Mary no sooner found herself, by “the power of the gospellers,” firmly seated on the throne, than she qualified the promises she had made them in the hour of need, declaring, that she would not compel her subjects to be of her religion, _till public order should be taken in it by common consent_. {21b} A parliament sufficiently obsequious was assembled; the laws passed in the preceding reign, in favour of the reformation, were repealed, the service and sacraments used at the close of the reign of Henry the Eighth, restored, {22a} and the crown and realm of England formally reconciled to the papal see. A series of barbarities ensued, under the alleged sanction of religion, at the recital of which humanity shudders. The persecutors had been taught in the school of their victims, and neither party understood the principles of religious liberty. All the people were required to come to church, where the mass was revived. {22b} To deny the supremacy of the pope, was once more become as heinous an offence as it had been to question that of Henry the Eighth during the latter years of his reign. The dungeon and the faggot {22c} were the arguments by which erring judgments and tender consciences were to be restored and comforted. When some members of the convocation declined subscribing to the doctrine of transubstantiation, the discussion was terminated with the following conclusive reasoning: “_You_,” said the prolocutor, “have the _word_, but _we_ have the _sword_.” {23a} An argument which has not unfrequently been employed in behalf of a state religion in more enlightened times. Rogers, the protomartyr of Mary’s short but frightfully sanguinary career, died because he would acknowledge no head but Christ, of his catholic church, and no authority above the word of God. {23b} Saunders, Hooper, Bradford, Latimer, Ridley, and the frail but afterwards repentant and magnanimous Cranmer, with a multitude of less eminent but equally honourable and worthy men, expired in the flames, to testify their attachment to a faith which, three years earlier, their rulers had taught them to admire and maintain.