XX. Behold the life and doctrine, instruction and practice, of the ancient Waldenses.[67] How harmless, how plain, how laborious, how exceeding serious and heavenly in their conversations! These were the men, women, aye children too, who, for above five hundred years, have valiantly, but passively maintained a cruel war, at the expense of their own innocent blood, against the unheard of cruelties and severities of several princes, nuncios, and bishops; but above all, of certain cruel inquisitors, of whom their historians report, that they held it was a greater evil to conceal a heretic than to be guilty of perjury; and for a clergyman to marry a wife than to keep a whore. In short, to dissent, though never so conscientiously, was worse than open immorality. It was against the like adversaries these poor Waldenses fought, by sufferings throughout the nations, by prisons, confiscations, banishments,[68] wandering from hill to valley, from den to cave; being mocked, whipped, racked, thrown from rocks and towers, driven on mountains,[69] and in one night thousands perished by excessive frost and snow, smothered in caves, starved, imprisoned, ripped up, hanged, dismembered, rifled, plundered, strangled, broiled, roasted, burned; and whatsoever could be invented to ruin men, women, and children. These Waldenses, you Protestants pretend to be your ancestors: from them, you say, you have your religion; and often, like the Jews of the prophets, are you building their praises in your discourses: but, O look back, I beseech you, how unlike are you to these afflicted pilgrims! What resemblance is there of their life in yours? Did they help to purchase and preserve you a liberty and religion, can you think, at the loss of all that was dear to them, that you might pass away your days and years in pride, wantonness, and vanity? What proportion bears your excess with their temperance;[70] your gaudiness with their plainness; your luxury and flesh-pleasing conversations with their simplicity and self-denial? But are you not got into that spirit and nature they condemned in their day; into that carnality and worldly mindedness they reproved in their persecutors, nay, into a strain of persecution too, which you seem to hide under a cloak of reformation? How can you hope to refute their persecutors whose worst part perhaps was their cruelty, that turn persecutors yourselves? What have you besides their good words, that is like them? And do you think that words will send off the blows of eternal vengeance? That a little by-rote babble, though of never so good expressions in themselves, shall serve your turn at the great day? No, from God I tell you, that whilst you live in the wantonness, pride, and luxury of the world, pleasing and fulfilling the lust of the eye, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life, (1 John, ii. 14-17,) God detests you all, and laughs you and your worship to scorn. Never tell me, I am too rash; it is the devil that says