The Quakers lamented Nayler's madness and backsliding, and they must not be held responsible for his aberrations, although they humanely sympathized with him in his sufferings, which were both unrighteously inflicted, and patiently endured. Nobody now will vindicate the treatment he received; yet few besides members of his own sect condemned it then. To the honour of Lord Fairfax's Presbyterian chaplain, Joshua Sprigg, it should be mentioned that he, with thirty other petitioners, personally sought, at the hands of Parliament, some mitigation of the culprit's doom.[389] [Sidenote: _Number of Sects._] Certain parties under the Commonwealth had the habit--and the fashion still exists--of exaggerating the number of religious denominations. Ephraim Pagitt--in his "Heresiography," published in 1654--gives a list of between forty and fifty sects: the historical worth of which enumeration we may estimate, when we observe that he distinguishes between Anabaptists and plunged Anabaptists--between Separatists and semi-Separatists--between Brownists and Barrowists--and then proceeds to specify three orders of Familists. Edwards, in his "Gangræna," with the strongest wish to make the most of his subject, cannot advance beyond the enumeration of sixteen kinds of schismatics: but immediately impeaches his own distinctions, by informing us that one and the same society of persons were Anabaptistical, Antinomian, Manifestarian, Libertine, Socinian, Millenary, Independent, and enthusiastical.[390] Our distrust is increased by a subjoined catalogue of one hundred and seventy-six errors, swollen by statements of substantially the same thing in varied forms of words, and by the inclusion of all sorts of trivial opinions and absurd vagaries. Edwards also gives another catalogue of "particular practices," twenty-eight in number; besides an array of "blasphemies" culled from sectarian prayers. Adopting such methods, there is no religious denomination which we might not subdivide at pleasure. A dozen different names may, with a little ingenuity, be given to almost every Church upon earth; and thus twelve different Churches may be made out of one.