could obtain immunity by an enormous fine. The Roman excuse to destroy
bodies in order to save souls, could scarcely be alleged by a Church
which might be bribed into connivance at heresy, and which derived a
revenue from the very nonconformity for which humbler victims were sent
to the gallows. It would, however, be unjust in the extreme to overlook
the enormous difference in the amount of persecution, exercised
respectively by the Protestant and the Roman Church. It is probable that
not many more than two hundred Catholics were executed as such, in
Elizabeth's reign, and this was ten score too many. But what was this
against eight hundred heretics burned, hanged, and drowned, in one Easter
week by Alva, against the eighteen thousand two hundred went to stake and
scaffold, as he boasted during his administration, against the vast
numbers of Protestants, whether they be counted by tens or by hundreds of
thousands, who perished by the edicts of Charles V., in the Netherlands,
or in the single Saint Bartholomew Massacre in France? Moreover, it
should never be forgotten--from undue anxiety for impartiality--that most
of the Catholics who were executed in England, suffered as conspirators
rather than as heretics. No foreign potentate, claiming to be vicegerent
of Christ, had denounced Philip as a bastard and, usurper, or had, by
means of a blasphemous fiction, which then was a terrible reality,
severed the bonds of allegiance by which his subjects were held, cut him
off from all communion with his fellow-creatures, and promised temporal
rewards and a crown of glory in heaven to those who should succeed in
depriving him of throne and life. Yet this was the position of
Elizabeth. It was war to the knife between her and Rome, declared by
Rome itself; nor was there any doubt whatever that the Seminary Priests
--seedlings transplanted from foreign nurseries, which were as watered
gardens for the growth of treason--were a perpetually organized band of
conspirators and assassins, with whom it was hardly an act of excessive
barbarity to deal in somewhat summary fashion. Doubtless it would have