I. As religion was acknowledged to be the first of duties, to put down popery and idolatry, and to purge the church from superstition and corruption, had always been held out by the parliament as its grand and most important object. It was this which, in the estimation of many of the combatants, gave the chief interest to the quarrel; this which made it, according to the language of the time, "a wrestle between Christ and antichrist," 1. Every good Protestant had been educated in the deepest horror of popery; there was a magic in the very word which awakened the prejudices and inflamed the passions of men; and the reader must have observed with what art and perseverance the patriot leaders employed it to confirm the attachment, and quicken the efforts of their followers. Scarcely a day occurred in which some order or ordinance, local or general, was not issued by the two houses; and very few of these, even on the most indifferent subjects, were permitted to pass without the assertion that the war had been originally provoked, and was still continued by the papists, for the sole purpose of the establishment of popery on the ruins of Protestantism. The constant repetition acted on the minds of the people as a sufficient proof of the charge; and the denials, the protestations, the appeals to heaven made by the king, were disregarded and condemned as unworthy artifices, adopted to deceive [Footnote 1: Journals, Feb. 25, March 21; of Lords, 287, 303.] the credulous and unwary. Under such circumstances, the Catholics found themselves exposed to insult and persecution wherever the influence of the parliament extended: for protection they were compelled to flee to the quarters of the royalists, and to fight under their banners; and this again confirmed the prejudice against them, and exposed them to additional obloquy and punishment. But the chiefs of the patriots, while for political purposes they pointed the hatred of their followers against the Catholics, appear not to have delighted unnecessarily in blood. They ordered, indeed, searches to be made for Catholic clergymen; they offered and paid rewards for their apprehension, and they occasionally gratified the zealots with the spectacle of an execution. The priests who suffered death in the course of the war amounted on an average to three for each year, a small number, if we consider the agitated state of the public mind during that period.[1] But it was the property of the lay Catholics which they chiefly sought, pretending that, as the war had been caused by their intrigues, its expenses ought to be defrayed by their forfeitures. It was ordained that two-thirds of the whole estate, both real and personal, of every papist, should be seized and sold for