"The almoner of Prince ----, who is a Roman Catholic, threatened an anabaptist that he would get him banished from the small estates which the prince governed. He told him that there were only three authorized sects in the empire--that which eats Jesus Christ, by faith alone, in a morsel of bread, while drinking out of a cup; that which eats Jesus Christ with bread alone; and that which eats Jesus Christ in body and in soul, without either bread or wine; and that as for the anabaptist who does not in any way eat God, he was not fit to live in monseigneur's territory. At last, the conversation kindling into greater violence, the almoner fiercely threatened the anabaptist that he would get him hanged. 'So much the worse for his highness,' replied the anabaptist; 'I am a large manufacturer; I employ two hundred workmen; I occasion the influx of two hundred thousand crowns a year into his territories; my family will go and settle somewhere else; monseigneur will in consequence be a loser.' "'But suppose monseigneur hangs up your two hundred workmen and your family,' rejoined the almoner, 'and gives your manufactory to good Catholics?' "'I defy him to do it,' says the old gentleman. 'A manufactory is not to be given like a farm; because industry cannot be given. It would be more silly for him to act so than to order all his horses to be killed, because, being a bad horseman, one may have thrown him off his back. The interest of monseigneur does not consist in my swallowing the godhead in a wafer, but in my procuring something to eat for his subjects, and increasing the revenues by my industry. I am a gentleman; and although I had the misfortune not to be born such, my occupation would compel me to become one; for mercantile transactions are of a very different nature from those of a court, and from your own. There can be no success in them without probity. Of what consequence is it to you that I was baptized at what is called the age of discretion, and you while you were an infant? Of what consequence is it to you that I worship God after the manner of my fathers? Were you able to follow up your wise maxims, from one end of the world to the other, you will hang up the Greek, who does not believe that the spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son; all the English, all the Hollanders, Danes, Swedes, Icelanders, Prussians, Hanoverians, Saxons, Holsteiners, Hessians, Würtembergers, Bernese, Hamburgers, Cossacks, Wallachians, and Russians, none of whom believe the pope to be infallible; all the Mussulmans, who believe in one God, and who give him neither father nor mother; the Indians, whose religion is more ancient than the Jewish; and the lettered Chinese, who, for the space of four thousand years, have served one only God without superstition and without fanaticism. This, then, is what you would perform had you but the power!' 'Most assuredly,' says the monk, 'for the zeal of the house of the Lord devours me.' _'Zelus domus suæ comedit me.'_