57] Quadrio, vol. ii. p. 416.

"POLITICAL RELIGIONISM."

In Professor Dugald Stewart's first Dissertation on the Progress of
Philosophy, I find this singular and significant term. It has occasioned
me to reflect on those contests for religion, in which a particular
faith has been made the ostensible pretext, while the secret motive was
usually political. The historians, who view in religious wars only
religion itself, have written large volumes, in which we may never
discover that they have either been a struggle to obtain predominance,
or an expedient to secure it. The hatreds of ambitious men have
disguised their own purposes, while Christianity has borne the odium of
loosening a destroying spirit among mankind; which, had Christianity
never existed, would have equally prevailed in human affairs. Of a moral
malady, it is not only necessary to know the nature, but to designate it
by a right name, that we may not err in our mode of treatment. If we
call that _religious_ which we shall find for the greater part is
_political_, we are likely to be mistaken in the regimen and the cure.

Fox, in his "Acts and Monuments," writes the martyrology of the
_Protestants_ in three mighty folios; where, in the third, "the tender
mercies" of the Catholics are "cut in wood" for those who might not
otherwise be enabled to read or spell them. Such pictures are
abridgments of long narratives, but they leave in the mind a fulness of
horror. Fox made more than one generation shudder; and his volume,
particularly this third, chained to a reading-desk in the halls of the
great, and in the aisles of churches, often detained the loiterer, as it
furnished some new scene of papistical horrors to paint forth on
returning to his fireside. The protestants were then the martyrs,
because, under Mary, the protestants had been thrown out of power.

Dodd has opposed to Fox three curious folios, which he calls "The Church
History of England," exhibiting a most abundant martyrology of the
_catholics_, inflicted by the hands of the protestants; who in the
succeeding reign of Elizabeth, after long trepidations and balancings,
were confirmed into power. He grieves over the delusion and seduction of
the black-letter romance of honest John Fox, which he says, "has
obtained a place in protestant churches next to the Bible, while John
Fox himself is esteemed little less than an evangelist."[158] Dodd's
narratives are not less pathetic: for the situati