this butchery was very considerable, and, in one
instance, lasted more than half an hour.

"The uncandid excuse for all this is, that the greater part of these
men were put to death for political, not for religious, crimes. That
is, a law is first passed, making it high treason for a priest to
exercise his function in England, and so, when he is caught and burnt,
this is not religious persecution, but an offence against the State.
We are, I hope, all too busy to need any answer to such childish,
uncandid reasoning as this."

And then the Letter goes on to give, with the fullest apparatus of details,
dates, and authorities, the miserable tale of religious persecution
practised, during three centuries, at home and abroad, by Anglicans on
Puritans, by Protestants on Romanists, by orthodox Protestants on heterodox
Protestants; and then, to clinch his argument and drive it home, he gives
the substance of the Penal Code under which Irish Catholics suffered so
cruelly and so long.

"With such facts as these, the cry of persecution will not do; it is
unwise to make it, because it can be so very easily, and so very
justly retorted. The business is to forget and forgive, to kiss and be
friends, and to say nothing of what has passed; which is to the credit
of neither party. There have been atrocious cruelties, and abominable
acts of injustice, on both sides. It is not worth while to contend who
shed the most blood, or whether death by fire is worse than hanging or
starving in prison. As far as England itself is concerned, the balance
may be better preserved. Cruelties exercised upon the Irish go for
nothing in English reasoning; but if it were not uncandid and
vexatious to consider Irish persecutions[90] as part of the case, I
firmly believe there have been two Catholics put to death for
religious causes in Great Britain for one Protestant who has suffered:
not that this proves much, because the Catholics have enjoyed the
sovereign power for so few years between this period and the
Reformation; and certainly it must be allowed that they were not
inactive, during that period, in the great work of pious combustion.

"It is however some extenuation of the Catholic excesses, that their
religion was the religion of the whole of Europe when the innovation
began. They were the ancient lords and masters of faith, before men