furnish for the hanging and embowelling of Papists.

The fact is that both pleas are worthless alike. If such
arguments are to pass current, it will be easy to prove that
there was never such a thing as religious persecution since the
creation. For there never was a religious persecution in which
some odious crime was not, justly or unjustly, said to be
obviously deducible from the doctrines of the persecuted party.
We might say, that the Caesars did not persecute the Christians;
that they only punished men who were charged, rightly or wrongly,
with burning Rome, and with committing the foulest abominations
in secret assemblies; and that the refusal to throw frankincense
on the altar of Jupiter was not the crime, but only evidence of
the crime. We might say, that the massacre of St. Bartholomew was
intended to extirpate, not a religious sect, but a political
party. For, beyond all doubt, the proceedings of the Huguenots,
from the conspiracy of Amboise to the battle of Moncontour, had
given much more trouble to the French monarchy than the Catholics
have ever given to the English monarchy since the Reformation;
and that too with much less excuse.

The true distinction is perfectly obvious. To punish a man
because he has committed a crime, or because he is believed,
though unjustly, to have committed a crime, is not persecution.
To punish a man, because we infer from the nature of some
doctrine which he holds, or from the conduct of other persons who
hold the same doctrines with him, that he will commit a crime is
persecution, and is, in every case, foolish and wicked.

When Elizabeth put Ballard and Babington to death, she was not