on he had taken?
To which Mr. Lithgow replied, that he was already resolved, unless he
could show substantial reasons to make him alter his opinion. The
superior, after a pedantic display of their seven sacraments, the
intercession of saints, transubstantiation, &c. boasted greatly of their
church, her antiquity, universality, and uniformity; all which Mr.
Lithgow denied: "For (said he) the profession of the faith I hold hath
been ever since the first days of the apostles, and Christ had ever his
own church (however obscure) in the greatest time of your darkness."

The Jesuits, finding their arguments had not the desired effect, that
torments could not shake his constancy, nor even the fear of the cruel
sentence he had reason to expect would be pronounced and executed on
him, after severe menaces, left him. On the eighth day after being the
last of their inquisition, when sentence is pronounced, they returned
again, but quite altered both in their words and behaviour after
repeating much of the same kind of arguments as before, they with
seeming tears in their eyes, pretended they were sorry from their heart
he must be obliged to undergo a terrible death, but above all, for the
loss of his most precious soul; and falling on their knees, cried out,
"Convert, convert, O dear brother, for our blessed lady's sake convert!"
To which he answered, "I fear neither death nor fire, being prepared for
both."

The first effects Mr. Lithgow felt of the determination of this bloody
tribunal was, a sentence to receive that night eleven different
tortures, and if he did not die in the execution of them, (which might
be reasonably expected from the maimed and disjointed condition he was
in) he was, after Easter holy-days, to be carried to Grenada, and there
burnt to ashes. The first part of this sentence was executed with great
barbarity that night; and it pleased God to give him strength both of
body and mind, to stand fast to the truth, and to survive the horrid
punishments inflicted on him.

After these barbarians had glutted themselves for the present, with
exercising on the unhappy prisoner the most distinguished cruelties,
they again put irons on, and conveyed him to his former dungeon. The
next morning he received some little comfort from the Turkish slave
before mentioned, who secretly brought him, in his shirt sleeve, some
raisins and figs, which he licked up in the best manner his strength
would permit with his tongue. It w