At the close of your first Letter, you promise to refer, in your next, to the evidences for the statements, which you have made. I was curious to see upon what historical evidence such a mass of forgeries could rest. In labouring through your second Letter, I discovered much intrinsic evidence, that you are a still improving adept in the art of bold and unsupported assertion, but not a shadow of proof, that your rants were ever believed by any man before yourself. The only authority cited in it is of one Collado, who asserted, that the conduct of the Jesuits was the occasion of the abolition of Christianity in Japan; but whoever has read the history of {287} Christianity in those islands will deny the position, upon grounds more certain than those on which it is advanced. The whole of your second Letter is no more than an unconnected congeries of the grossest impostures. In my second I marked out a few; I shall presently indicate some others; and I shall leave my readers to determine, whether you have substantiated your first calumnies, only by the production of new ones. I have searched your third Letter in quest of evidence, of proof, of historical support; and I find, that the two most prominent names in it are Prynne and De Thou. I may here remark, that it is highly illiberal and unjust to uphold imputations of guilt, even against the worst of culprits, solely upon the asseverations of their declared enemies; and, if these enemies stand otherwise convicted of malicious calumnies, this circumstance alone must go far towards the acquittal of the accused. Now, it is well known, {288} that Prynne and De Thou wrote in the most turbulent times, amidst the distractions and rage of civil wars, occasioned in England and in France by restless sectaries; that they were both inflamed with party rage, and never spared their adversaries. If, then, their testimony is to be admitted as irrefragable, in the present times, in one point, why not in another? If, without a shadow of proof, we must believe with Prynne and you, that the Irish massacre and the British civil wars were to be imputed to Jesuits, and especially to Cuneus, the pope's nuncio, and cardinal Barberini (who, by the way, never were Jesuits), we must also believe every thing written by that foul mouthed lawyer against Charles I, against episcopacy, and against the famous archbishop Laud. But we know, that the fellow's ears were twice bored and cropped in the pillory for his defamatory libels, and that his cheeks were seared with the letters S. L. (seditious libeller.) I believe my readers will agree, that the stigma might, with propriety, be transferred to the unblushing front of the retailer of his falsehoods. {289} Before I speak of De Thou, I will mention only a few of your insufferable fabrications, which hardly Prynne himself would have ventured to utter. 1. "In matters both of _faith_ and practice, the members of the society are bound to obey the society, and not the