“A Dutchman, making his confession to a mass-priest at Rome, promised, by an oath, to keep secret whatever the priest would impart to him, till he came into Germany, upon which the priest pretended to give him a leg of the ass on which Christ rode into Jerusalem, very neatly bound up in a silken cloth, and said, ‘This is the holy relic on which the Lord Christ did corporeally sit, and with his sacred legs touched this ass’s leg!’ The Dutchman was wonderfully pleased, and carried the holy relic with him into Germany, and when he came upon the borders, boasted of his holy possession in the presence of four others of his comrades, at the same time showing it to them; but each of the four having also received a leg from the priest, and promised the same secrecy, he inquired with astonishment, ‘Whether that ass had five legs!’” The frauds practised by the professed ministers of religion, during the almost universal prevalence of popery, most affectingly display the depravity of the human heart, and the impious tendency of false religion. Never, perhaps, was a stratagem acted more infamous than one in Berne, in the year 1509, the following account of which drawn from Ruchet’s “Histoire de la Réformation en Suisse,” and Höttinger’s “Hist. Eccles. Helvet.,” is given in Mosheim’s “Eccles. Hist.” A similar account may be found in bishop Burnet’s Travels through France, Italy, etc. The stratagem in question was the consequence of a rivalship between the Franciscans and Dominicans, and more especially of their controversy concerning the immaculate conception of the virgin Mary. The former maintained, that she was born without the blemish of original sin; the latter asserted the contrary. The doctrine of the Franciscans, in an age of darkness and superstition, could not but be popular; and hence, the Dominicans lost ground from day to day. To support the credit of their order, they resolved, at a chapter held at Vimpsen in the year 1504, to have recourse to fictitious visions and dreams, in which the people at that time had an easy faith; and they determined to make Berne the scene of their operations. A person named Jetzer, who was extremely simple, and much inclined to austerities, and who had taken their habit as a lay-brother, was chosen as the instrument of the delusions they were contriving. One of the four Dominicans, who had undertaken the management of this plot, conveyed himself secretly into Jetzer’s cell; and, about midnight, appeared to him in a horrid figure, surrounded with howling dogs, and seemed to blow fire from his nostrils, by the means of a box of combustibles which he held near his mouth. In this frightful form, he approached Jetzer’s bed, told him that he was the ghost of a Dominican, who had been killed at Paris, as a judgment from heaven for laying aside his monastic habit; that he was condemned to purgatory for this crime; adding, that, by his means, he might be rescued from his misery, which was beyond expression.