It is not sufficient for the more moderate and well-meaning papists, of which I doubt not there are many, to produce the evidences of their loyalty to the late king, and to declare their innocency in this plot. I will grant their behaviour in the first to have been as loyal and as brave as they desire; and will be willing to hold them excused as to the second, (I mean when it comes to my turn, and after my betters; for it is a madness to be sober alone, while the nation continues drunk:) but that saying of their father Cres.[15] is still running in my head,--that they may be dispensed with in their obedience to an heretic prince, while the necessity of the times shall oblige them to it; (for that, as another of them tells us, is only the effect of Christian prudence;) but when once they shall get power to shake him off, an heretic is no lawful king, and consequently to rise against him is no rebellion. I should be glad, therefore, that they would follow the advice which was charitably given them by a reverend prelate of our church, namely, that they would join in a public act of disowning and detesting those jesuitic principles, and subscribe to all doctrines which deny the pope's authority of deposing kings, and releasing subjects from their oath of allegiance; to which, I should think, they might easily be induced, if it be true, that this present pope has condemned the doctrine of king-killing; a thesis of the Jesuits, maintained, amongst others, _ex cathedra_, as they call it, or in open consistory. Leaving them, therefore, in so fair a way, (if they please themselves,) of satisfying all reasonable men of their sincerity and good meaning to the government, I shall make bold to consider that other extreme of our religion, I mean the fanatics, or schismatics, of the English church. Since the Bible has been translated into our tongue, they have used it so, as if their business was not to be saved, but to be damned by its contents. If we consider only them, better had it been for the English nation, that it had still remained in the original Greek and Hebrew, or at least in the honest Latin of St Jerome, than that several texts in it should have been prevaricated to the destruction of that government, which put it into so ungrateful hands.