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xxii
PREFACE.

denied. We have neither desire nor temptation to do it. Wherever, from circumstances, their peculiar faith fails, or is feeble, in its operation upon them, the principles of simple and independent Christianity are at liberty to act and produce their genuine effects in proportion to their force and purity. But it is past denial, that wherever the Church, that is, of Rome, commands, every true son of that Church must and will obey, whatever repugnance his natural conscience, or natural humanity, may feel and oppose; and there is not a nation where Christianity has been exposed to the superior power of Popery, whose history in such times has not been written in letters of blood; and in this nation, in particular, the Italian usurper and his instruments will have an awful account to settle for the barbarities perpetrated by them under the name and pretence of religion. That these agents of religious cruelty may, aloof from their intolerant creed, have possessed every valuable and even amiable qualification, only serves to aggravate the charge against a misnamed religion, which no human virtue has power to arrest in her inhuman course, and which, in that course, can even convert the benevolent into savages. The concluding reflection of Bishop Mant in his valuable History of the Church of Ireland, on the character of Mary I. of England, is just and important. Having suggested the sincerity of her zeal as the cause of her cruelty, he adds, "But the more her evil deeds are extenuated, by the supposition of the sincerity of her