Turning to Bramhall's "Vindication of himself and the Episcopal clergy from the Presbyterian charge of Popery,"--a book written about the year 1659, though not published till 1672[327]--in reply to Baxter's "Treatise of the Grotian Religion," we find in it a defence of the conduct of Episcopalians in the days of their prosperity. Baxter had complained of the persecutions inflicted by them upon the Puritans. According to him, in some places, it had been much more dangerous for a minister to preach a lecture once or twice on the lord's Day, or to expound the Catechism, than it had been never to preach at all. Bramhall replies: "If preachers shall not content themselves to sow the wheat over again, but shall sow tares above the wheat; if they shall seek to introduce new doctrines, new disciplines, and new forms of worship, by popular sermons, different from and destructive to those which are established by law, who can blame the magistrates, political and ecclesiastical, if they begin to look about them? A seditious orator is dangerous everywhere, but nowhere more than in the pulpit. Then blame not magistrates, if they punish seditious or schismatical preachers more than one who is no preacher. All laws, and all prudent magistrates, regard public dangers more than particular defects."[328] The Bishop did not see that he employed a two-edged sword, and that while aiming a blow at his adversary, he ran the risk of receiving, through counter-thrusts, a wound from the back stroke of his own weapon. If to preach doctrines contrary to those which were established by law deserved chastisement from the magistrate--if such preaching was seditious preaching, then the Commonwealth Government was justified in depriving and silencing Episcopalian ministers. Bramhall vindicated his own party in having done the very same sort of thing which he now complained of as unrighteous when done by his opponents. It is plain enough that both parties were in the wrong, and that each furnished the other with a miserable pretext for revengeful injustice. And when the same writer, comparing Nonconformist with Episcopal sufferers, quietly says: the former suffered for faction, and the latter for faith,[329] and so concludes the subject,--everybody must smile to see how he assumes as settled the very point which was in dispute. His opponents could just as easily say that they were faithful, and that he and his brethren were factious. It is the old story--as old as human nature, and as modern as this morning's newspaper.