If there is one spectacle more odious than another of all which history presents to us, whether it take place amongst Mahometan or Christian, Catholic or Protestant, it is this:--to see men practising all the terrible brutalities of war, treading down their enemies, doing all that rage and the worst passions prompt, and doing all amidst exclamations of piety, devout acknowledgments of submission to Divine will, and professions of gratitude to God. Other religious factions have committed far greater atrocities than the Puritans, but nowhere in history is this same spectacle exhibited with more distasteful and sickening accompaniments. The Moslem thanked God upon his sword in at least a somewhat soldierly manner; and the Catholic, by the very pomp with which he chants his _Te Deum_, somewhat conceals the meaning of his act, and, keeping God a little out of sight, makes his mass express the natural feeling of a human triumph. But the sleek Puritan, at once grovelling and presumptuous, mingles with his sanguinary mood all the morbid sickly conceit, all the crawling affected humility of the conventicle. All his bloodsheds are "mercies," and they are granted in answer to his long and miserable prayers--prayers which, to a man of rational piety, sound very much like blasphemies. He carries with him to the battle-field, to the siege, to the massacre, not one even of those generous feelings which war itself permits towards a foe. He chooses to call his enemy the enemy of God, and kneels before he fights, that the inexpressible _mercy_ may be granted of cutting his throat!