or disposed of to masters of ships to be transported to slavery. 5. Had they satisfied themselves with murdering them out of hand, it would have been more tolerable, and reckoned some degree of mercy, in comparison of their malice; which, after all their endeavours to murder their souls, by ensnaring offers, enslaving bonds, blasphemous and contradictory oaths, and multiplying captious questions to catch the conscience, or at least vex the spirits of the righteous, whom they could not prevail with to put forth their hands into iniquity, did proceed to invent all exquisite torments more terrible than death. Some at their first apprehending were tortured with fire-matches, burning and for ever thereafter disabling their hands: then laid fast, and locked up in great irons upon their legs, where they lay many months in the cold of winter, without any relaxation. Some were tortured with the boots, squeezing out the marrow of their legs: others with thumbkins, piercing and bruising the bones of their thumbs: and some tormented with both one after another, and besides, kept waking nine nights together by watchful soldiers, who were sworn not to let the afflicted person sleep all that time. 6. All this tyranny had been the more tolerable, if they had kept within any bounds of colourable or pretended shadow of legality, or in any consonancy to their own wicked laws, or exemplars of any former persecutions. But in an ambition to outdo all the Neros, Domitians, Dioclesians, duke d'Alvas, or Lewis le Grands, they scorned all forms, as well as justice of law, and set up monstrous monuments of unprecedented illegality and inhumanity. For when, after all their hornings, harassings, huntings, searchings, chafings, catchings, imprisonments, torturings, banishments, and effusions of blood, yet they could not get the meetings crushed, either in public or private, or the zeal of the poor wanderers quenched, with whom they had interdicted all harbour, supply, comfort, refreshment, converse or correspondence, and whom they had driven out of their own and all other habitations, in towns, villages, or cottages, to the deserts, mountains, muirs, and mosses, in whose hags and holes they were forced to make dens and caves to hide themselves, but that they would still meet for the worship of God, either in public (though mostly in the cold winter nights) or in their private fellowships for prayer and conference; and to rescue their brethren, and prevent their murder in these extremities, would surprize and take advantages of the soldiers now and then: they then raged beyond all bounds, and not only apprehending many innocent persons (against whom they had nothing to accuse them of, but because they could not satisfy them in their answers) sentenced, and executed them, all in one day, and made an act to do so with all; but allowed the bloody soldiers to murder them, without either trial or sentence. Especially after the