Men of the seventeenth century habitually expressed their thoughts with a coarseness which is disgusting to the modern mind. A man named Keach, who had taught that infants ought not to be baptized, was indicted for “maliciously writing and publishing a seditious and venomous book, wherein are contained damnable positions contrary to the book of common prayer.”[723] At his speech at the opening of Parliament in 1679 Lord Chancellor Finch likened the Roman Catholic priests and their pupils to “the Sons of Darkness,” and declared that “the very shame and reproach which attends such abominable practices hath covered so many faces with new and strange confusions, that it hath proved a powerful argument for their conversion; nor is it to be wondered at that they could no longer believe all that to be Gospel which their priests taught them, when they saw the way and means of introducing it was so far from being Evangelical.”[724] Other parties were equally violent; and on two separate occasions Shaftesbury swore that he would have the lives of the men who had advised the king to measures obnoxious to his party. The most notorious of all Scroggs’ utterances, an acrid sneer at the doctrine of transubstantiation: “They eat their God, they kill their king, and saint the murderer,” is paralleled almost exactly by Dryden’s couplet: Such savoury deities must needs be good. As served at once for worship and for food;[725] and Dryden, who at this time belonged to the court and high church party, became within five years himself a Roman Catholic. The whole literature of the time bears witness to the fact that such language was scarcely beyond the ordinary. It was a convention of the age and must be accepted as such. There would be no greater mistake than to attribute to words of the sort too great an influence on action. The results which attended them were unimportant. Of all Chief Justice Scroggs’ harangues the most consistently brutal and offensive was that directed at Marshal, at the trial of Sir George Wakeman.[726] Yet it was followed immediately by a fair summing up and the acquittal of the prisoners.