g under Elizabeth.
To refuse the Queen's supremacy was death; it was death to continue in
that religion, which, at her coronation she had sworn to firmly believe
and defend. It was high treason to admit or harbour, or relieve a
priest, and hosts of these were ripped up, for, in the piety of their
hearts, risking all to afford the consolations of their religion to the
Catholics of England. Victim after victim came to the sacrifice, mostly
from the college of Douay. It is really horrible to read of these good
and faithful champions of their religion being hung, cut down
instantaneously, their bellies ripped up, their hearts cut out, their
bodies chopped in pieces with every insult and indignity added to
injury, all through this reign, and then to be talked to about 'bloody
Mary,' and the 'Good Queen-Bess.' Verily, countrymen, you are vilely
deceived. Taking into account the rippings, and burnings, and roastings,
and hanging; the racks, whips, fines, imprisonments, and other horrors
of the reign of this 'Good Bess,' there was a hundred times more human
misery inflicted in her reign than in that of' Bloody Mary.' [82:1]

The second Catherine of Russia, though remarkable for rigid and
scrupulous adherence to the ceremonial mummeries of her 'true church,'
was at the same time as remarkable for liberality of sentiment. It is
said, that upon a certain occasion, being strongly advised by her
ministers to deal out severe punishment on some heretics of Atheistical
tendencies, who had given offence by rather freely expressing their
opinions, she laughingly said, 'Oh, fie, gentlemen fie, if these
heretics are to be eternally miserable in the other world, we really
ought to let them be comfortable in this.'

Few religious persons are liberal as this empress, whose strong good
sense seems to have been fully a match for her bad education: that
education was Christian. She was taught to loathe the opinions, aye, and
the persons, of heretics, under which denomination may be included all
dissenters from religious truth as it was in her, or rather in the
church of which she was chief member. No other kind of teaching is
accounted orthodox in our 'land of Bibles' than that of state paid
priests of law established religion. Look at the true Church of
England's Thirty-Nine Articles. Do they not abound in anathema, and
literally teem with the venom of intolerance? Do they not shock the
better feelings even of those who believe them divine? Th