OF TOLERATION. 177
honesty, order, and the hke. If a man should go about to delineate the Christian religion by the lines and features drawn thereof in the invectives and accusations of their adversaries, he might justly sup- 230se that indeed that was their god which was set up at Rome with this inscription, " Deus Christianorum Ononychites;" being an image with ass's ears, in a gown, claws or talons upon one foot, with a book in his hand. Charged they were that they worshipped an ass's head ; which impious folly — first fastened on the Jews by Tacitus, Hist, lib. V. cap. 1, in these words, " Effigiem animalis, quo mon- strante errorem sitimque depulerant, penetrali sacravere" (having before set out a feigned direction received by a company of asses), Avhich he had borrowed from Apion, a railing Egyptian of Alexan- dria^— was so ingrafted in their minds that no defensative could be allowed. The^ sun, the cross, " sacerdotis genitalia," were either really supposed, or impiously imposed on them, as the objects of their worship. The blood and flesh of infants, at Thyestean banquets, was said to be their food and provision ; promiscuous lust, with incest, their chiefest refreshment. Such as these it concerned them to have them thought to be, l;eing resolved to use them as if they were so indeed. Hence I am not sometimes without some suspicion, that many of the impure abominations, follies, villanies, which are ascribed unto the primitive heretics, yea, the very Gnostics themselves (upon whom the filth that lies is beyond all possible belief),^ might be feigned and imposed, as to a great part thereof. For though not the very same, yet things as foolish and opposite to the light of nature, were at the same time charged on the most orthodox.
But you will say. They who charged these things upon the Catholics were Pagans, enemies of God and Christ ; but these, who so charged heretics, were Christians themselves. And so say I also, and there- fore, for reverence of the name (though perhaps I could), I say no more. But yet this I say, that story which you have in Minutius Felix (or Arnobius, viii. book apologetical),of the meeting of Christians, the dra\ving away of the light by a dog tied to the candlestick, so to make way for adulteries and incests, I have heard more than once told with no small confidence of Bro\vnists and Puritans. Hath not this very same course been taken in latter ages? Consult the writ-
1 Joseph, ad. Ap., lib. i.
^ " Moses iiovos ritus contrarlosque cpcteris mortalibus indidit. Profana illic omnia, quae apiid nos sacra; ruisum concessa apud illos, quae nobis incesta. Pro- jectissima ad libidinem gens alienaruni conciibitum abstinent, inter se nihil illici- tiim." — Tacitus (de Judaeis) Hist., lib. v. " Judaaos, impulsore Chresto quotidie tumultuantes Roma expulit," falsely and foolishly. — Suet. Claud., cap. xxv. "Quae- sitissimis poenis afficiebat, quos per flagitia invisos vulgus Christianos apellabat." Tac. An., lib. xv. " Afflicti snppliciis Cliristiani, genus hominum superstitionis uovap ac maleficae." — Sueton. in Nerone, cap. xvi.
' Epiphan. torn. ii. lib. 1, User. 26. VOL. VIIL 12
178 OF TOLERATION.
ings of Waldonsis and the rest of his companions, about Wickhffe and his followers, — see the occasion of his falling off from Rome in our own chronicles, in Fabian of old, yea, and Daniel of late, to gratify a popish court; — of Eckius, Hosius, Staphylus, Bolsec, Bellarmine, and the rest who have undertaken to pourtray out unto us Luther and Calvin, with their followers; — and you will quickly see that their great design was to put on (as they did upon the head of John Huss at the Council of Constance, when he was led to the stake) the ugly visard of some devilish appearance, that under tliat form they might fit them for fire and fagot. And herein also is the polity of the dra- gon derived to the false prophet, and a colour tempered for persecu- tors to imbrue their hands in the blood of martyi's.
This was the old Roman way, and I thought it not amiss to cau- tionate those enjoying truth and authority, that, if it be possible, they may not walk in their steps and method. The course accounted so sovereign for the extirpation of error was, as you see, first invented for the extirpation of truth.
2. I desire it may be obsei'ved, that the general issue and tendence of unlimited arbitrary persecution, or punishing for conscience' sake (because in all ages, o'l tXe/ovss naxoi, and the worst of men have sat at the upper end of the world, for the most part more false worshippers having hitherto enjoyed authority over others than followers of the Lamb), hath been pernicious, fatal, and dreadful to the profession and j)rofessors of the gospel, — little or not at all serviceable to the truth.
I have heard it averred by a reverend and learned personage, that more blood of heretics hath been shed by wholesome severity, in the maintenance of the truth and opposition unto errors, than hath been shed of .the witnesses of Jesus by the sword of persecution, in the hands of heretics and false worshippers; — an assertion, I conceive, under favour, so exceedingly distant from the reality of the thing itself, that I dare take upon me, against any man breathing, that in sundry Christian pi-ovinccs, — almost in every one of the west, — more lives have been sacrificed to the one idol Htereticidium, of those that bear witness to the truth, in the belief for which they suffered, than all the heretics, properly so called, that ever were slain in all the pro- vinces of the world by men professing the gospel. And I shall give that worthy divine, or any other of his persuasion, his option among all the chiefest provinces of Europe, to tie me up unto Avhicli they please. He that shall consider that above sixty thousand persons were, in six years or little more, cut off in a judicial way, by Duke D'Alva in the Netherlands, in pursuit of the sentence of the uiquisi- tion, will conclude that there is " causa facilis" in my hand.