Though no public protest was made, the retrospective Fuller testifies that "such burning of heretics much startled common people, pitying all in pain, and prone to asperse justice itself with cruelty, because of the novelty (!) and hideousness of the punishment." [91] It is noteworthy that within a few years of the burning of Legate and Wightman there appeared quite a cluster of treatises explicitly contending for toleration. In 1614 came Religion's Peace: or, a Plea for Liberty of Conscience, by Leonard Busher, the first English book of the kind. In 1615 came Persecution for Religion Judged and Condemned; and in 1620 An Humble Supplication to the King's Majesty, pressing the same doctrine. [92] There is no record of any outcry over these works, though they are tolerably freespoken in their indictment of the coercive school; and they had all to be reprinted a generation later, their point having never been carried; but it may be surmised that their appeal, which is substantially well reasoned from a secular as well as from a theological point of view, had something to do with the abandonment of persecution unto death. Even King James, in opening the Parliament of 1614, professed to recognize that no religion or heresy was ever extirpated by violence. That an age of cruel repression of heresy had promoted unbelief is clear from the Atheomastix of Bishop Fotherby (1622), which notes among other things that as a result of constant disputing "the Scriptures (with many) have lost their authority, and are thought onely fit for the ignorant and idiote." [93] On this head the bishop attempts no answer; and on his chosen theme he is perhaps the worst of all apologists. His admission that there can be no à priori proof of deity [94] may be counted to him for candour; but the childishness of his reasoning à posteriori excludes the ascription of philosophic insight. He does but use the old pseudo-arguments of universal consent and design, with the simple device of translating polytheistic terms into monotheistic. All the while he makes the usual suggestions that there are few or no atheists to convert, and these not worth converting--this at a folio's length. The book tells only of difficulties evaded by vociferation. And while the growing stress of the strife between the ecclesiasticism of the Crown and the forces of nonconformity more and more thrust to the front religio-political issues, there began alongside of those strifes the new and powerful propaganda of deism, which, beginning with the Latin treatise, De Veritate, of Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1624), was gradually to leaven English thought for over a century.