To those who accuse the Scottish protestants of displaying the same spirit of intolerance by which the Roman catholics were distinguished, I would recommend the following statement of a French author, who had formed a more just notion of these transactions than many of our own writers. “Mary (says he,) was brought up in France, accustomed to see protestants burnt to death, and instructed in the maxims of her uncles, the Guises, who maintained {29} that it was necessary to exterminate, without mercy, the pretended reformed. With these dispositions she arrived in Scotland, which was wholly reformed, with the exception of a few lords. The kingdom received her, acknowledged her as their queen, and obeyed her in all things according to the laws of the country. I maintain, that, in the state of men’s spirits at that time, if a Huguenot queen had come to take possession of a Roman catholic kingdom, with the slender retinue with which Mary went to Scotland, the first thing they would have done would have been to arrest her; and if she had persevered in her religion, they would have procured her degradation by the pope, thrown her into the Inquisition, and burnt her as a heretic. There is not an honest man who can deny this.”[43] After all, it is surely unnecessary to apologize for the restrictions which our ancestors were desirous of imposing on queen Mary, to those who approve of the present constitution of Britain, according to which every papist is excluded from succeeding to the throne, and the reigning monarch, by setting up mass in his chapel, would virtually forfeit his crown. Is popery {30} more dangerous now than it was two hundred and fifty years ago?