But let it not be imagined that all the guilt of persecution rested upon the Church of Rome. Protestantism persecuted as freely as the Papacy. That heretics should be put down, and if necessary killed, was a principle common to both Churches. The question in dispute was, Which _were_ the heretics? This is so incontestable that we need not fortify it with Protestant quotations and Protestant examples. It is not true, as Dr. Farrar alleges, that Luther "boldly proclaimed that thoughts are toll-free," if it is meant that he condemned persecution. Thoughts were toll-free against Romish exactions; that was what Luther meant. He held as strongly as any Papist that those who denied one essential doctrine of Christianity should be punished by the magistrates. He declared that reason always led to unbelief. He besought the Protestant princes to uphold "the faith" by every means in their power. And when the serfs rebelled, thinking that the "freedom" the Reformers talked about was to become a reality, it was Luther who wrote against them with unsurpassable ferocity, and advised that they should be "slaughtered like mad dogs." Dr. Farrar rather judiciously refrains from mentioning Calvin in this connection, but in another part of the volume he refers to the great Genevian "reformer" in a somewhat gingerly manner. When the sins of Catholics have to be condemned he is quite dithyrambic; but when he has to censure the sins of Protestants he displays a most touching tenderness. Nothing could well be worse than the mixture of religious bigotry, personal spleen, and low duplicity, with which Calvin hunted Servetus to his fiery doom. Dr. Farrar sympathetically describes this vile act as an "error." He tries to satisfy his conscience, afterwards, by confessing that the Calvinists in general "were for the most part as severe to all who differed from them as they imagined God to be severe to the greater part of the human race." Dr. Farrar's treatment of this subject is superficial. It is not a Bible text here or there which is the real basis of persecution. We advise him to read George Eliot's review of Lecky's _History of Rationalism_. He will then see that persecution is founded upon the fatal doctrine of salvation by faith. This doctrine makes the heretic more noxious than a serpent. A serpent poisons the body, a heretic poisons the soul. If it be true that his teaching may draw souls to hell, human welfare demands his extermination. Dr. Farrar does not disclaim this doctrine, and if he fails to act upon it he only betrays an amiable inconsistency. His heart is better than his head.