In those blithesome days a citizen could not vote unless he belonged to the Congregational Church and kissed the big toe of Cotton Mather, the superstitious bigot, the Prosecutor of the New England Protestant Inquisition. Ridpath says that Mather was chiefly responsible for the horrors and crimes of the Salem Witchcraft, and that this massacre, torture and imprisonment of 263 innocent persons was started by a Salem minister for the purpose of revenging himself upon those of his flock who antagonized him.—Ridpath’s Hist. of U. S. 131. The Quakers were perhaps the only decent body of Christians up to that time, and for that reason the Puritan pirates and slave-dealers hung four of them, one woman and three men, on Boston Common. “Infuse a few different kinds of religious poison into a community of human beings, and they hate each other like tigers. Religious creeds have a worse effect on a man than booze. You can work the booze out of your system and quit the stuff, but when a victim is loaded up on some rotten brand of orthodoxy, it is hard to do anything with him. A Protestant will damn the Catholics, and a Catholic will yell ‘To Hell with the Protestants,’ and both will hate the Jews.”—Roman Religion, 27. The churches have soaked the earth with the blood of their countless victims. Frederick, the Emperor of Germany, sentenced heretics of all descriptions alive to the flames. Sixty thousand heretics were slaughtered in the city of Beziers. Seventy thousand Huguenots were put to death in France. The Massacre of St. Bartholomew began at midnight, Aug. 23, 1572, and the carnival of death lasted seven days. Medals commemorating the holy event were distributed among the loyal butchers.—Roman Religion, 35. “When the Crusaders took Jerusalem from the Moslems in 969 A. D., they massacred all the Mussulmans and burned the Jews alive. Seventy thousand persons were put to death in a week to attest the superior morality of the Christians.”—Boston Sun. American. Dr. Fernald says that Sultan Bejazet wrote to Pope Alexander VI that he would give him 300,000 ducats, several cities and the shirt of Jesus Christ if His Holiness would kill Zimzim, the brother of the Sultan, “and you Most Illustrious Lord will not commit a crime, since by your religion Christians are ordered to exterminate heretics and infidels.” The Ency. Brit. says that “the unfortunate prince was murdered by Alexander, who received 300,000 ducats as the reward of the crime.” Zimzim was held captive by certain bandits in Rhodes, a Commandery of the Knights of St. John, a Christian organization under the domination of Alexander. Alexander was a Borgia, whose children were all illegitimate. CHAPTER XIX. The Bible.