It is curious enough to hear these men inveigh against the intolerant and persecuting spirit of the church of Rome, at the very time when they themselves were manifesting the selfsame spirit, and pursuing the same tyrannical and murderous course which they so much condemned in the papists. In our own country, John Fox, the martyrologist, was employed in writing huge folios to describe the horrors of popish persecution, while his own protestant sovereign and her bishops and clergy were persecuting the poor puritans with unfeeling and relentless rigour. Protestants can see the hatefulness of persecution in the papists, but very often are quite blind to it in themselves, or those of their own party. {642} They can discern what is bad in their opponents, but overlook what is equally so in themselves. Christianity, in its first aspect and fundamental principles, is a religion of peace and good will towards men, which forbids any to domineer over their brethren, or exercise authority over their consciences, and requires, in all things whatsoever, to do to others as we would they should do to us. But the reformers overlooked all this, and discovered either an entire ignorance of, or a fixed aversion to these godlike principles. In either case they must have been wretchedly qualified to reform and christianize the world, or form a religion worthy the reception of mankind. A religion, however, they would and did form, and never rested till they got it established by the civil power, and enforced by penal sanctions; and this rendered its native intolerance doubly pernicious and detestable. “No religion” (says an excellent writer) “can be established without penal sanctions, and all penal sanctions in cases of religion are persecutions. Before a man can persecute he must renounce the generous tolerant dispositions of a christian. No religion can be established without human creeds; and subscription to all human creeds implies two dispositions contrary to true religion, and both expressly forbidden by the author of it. These two dispositions are, love of dominion over conscience in the imposer, and an abject preference of slavery in the subscriber. The first usurps the rights of Christ; the last swears allegiance to a pretender. The first domineers, and gives laws like a tyrant; the last truckles like a vassal. The first assumes a dominion incompatible with his frailty, impossible even to his dignity, yea even denied to the dignity of angels; the last yields a low submission, inconsistent with his own dignity, and ruinous to that very religion, which he pretends by this mean to support.” {644}