only people
who have proscribed men for the exercise of their religious belief. If we
calmly study the history of other nations our enmity towards Spain will
considerably relax, and we shall have to reserve for her neighbors a
portion of our indignation. No impartial student of history will deny that
the leaders of the reformed religions, whenever they gained the
ascendency, exercised violence toward those who differed from them in
faith. I mention this not by way of recrimination, nor in palliation of
the proscriptions of the Spanish government; for one offence is not
justified by another. My object is merely to show that "they who live in
glass houses should not throw stones;" and that it is not honest to make
Spain the scapegoat, bearing alone on her shoulders the odium of religious
intolerance.

It should not be forgotten that John Calvin burned Michael Servetus at the
stake for heresy; that the arch-reformer not only avowed but also
justified the deed in his writings; and that he established in Geneva an
Inquisition for the punishment of refractory Christians.

It should also be remembered that Luther advocated the most merciless
doctrine towards the Jews. According to his apologist Seckendorf, the
German Reformer said that their synagogues ought to be destroyed, their
houses pulled down, their prayer-books, and even the books of the Old
Testament, to be taken from them. Their rabbis ought to be forbidden to
teach and be compelled to gain their livelihood by hard labor.

It should also be borne in mind that Henry VIII. and his successors for
many generations inflicted fines, imprisonment and death on thousands of
their subjects for denying the spiritual supremacy of the temporal
sovereign. This galling Inquisition lasted for nearly three hundred years,
and the severity of its decrees scarcely finds a parallel in the Spanish
Inquisition. Prescott avows that the administration of Elizabeth was "not
a whit less despotic and scarcely less sanguinary than"(318) that of
Isabella. The clergy of Ireland, under Cromwell, were ordered, under pain
of death, to quit their country, and theological students were obliged to
pursue their studies in foreign seminaries. Any Priest who dared to return
to his native country forfeited his life. Whoever harbored a Priest
suffered death, and they who knew his hiding-place and did not reveal it
to the Inquisitors had both their ears cut off.

At this very moment not only in England, b