suade nor plague; but none of them pretended to make the deity by a word. To Popish cheats, falsely called Catholics, the glory bath been reserved of surpassing the highest cheats in Paganism, as well as the highest cruelty and the most extravagant forgeries of Pagans. Holy lies and holy rage, generally found necessary to support all pious impostures, are essentially so to uphold the greatest of all.

For a creature to create the eternal Creator of all things, is a wonderful falsehood to assert, and impossible to be believed, as it is a contradiction too glaring to be conceived by the heart of man, or to be uttered by any mouth, where the mind is not first awed by terrors, or intoxicated by delusions, or corrupted by craft. Can they believe in God, who assert, that the one God can be eaten whole by millions, every day, can be created and renewed and multiplied daily, and still remain one God? Yet, with these omnipotent blasphemers, it is atheism to deby his multiplication; so that it is at once atheism to doubt his unity, and atheism to deny that he may be new created every hour, and a box of consecrated waters contains a host of Gods, all one and the same God. Could the wit of da mons invent bigher or more profane mockery? Nor would it be higher mockery in these shameless conjurers to pretend to annihilate their Creator. They might wrest a text as literally to their purpose. Has not our blessed Saviour said to his disciples, "A little while, and ye shall not see me? A text tending as much to the power of the priest in unmaking God, as the other text, from whence they would derive power to make God.

What reasonable man, what Christian man, would be of a church where this is the prime article of faith, and where damnation is denounced against all who doubt it? Who would hear, much less follow, such dreadful guides, who maintain such impious contradictions, and burn all who will not profess a sacred lye and impossibility, which is an affront to the Deity, an insult upon the Almighty, or rather a denial of bis existence ?

A piece of bread, bread to the sight, bread to the touch, taste and swell, becomes at once, in the logic of priests, and by their legerdemain, the Almighty and immutable God, and is sliced into infinite gods though they impudently maintain, that they believe no more than one God; yet would burn you alive, if you questioned daily their power and practice of creating gods without number.

They practise the same barefaced inconsistency in their treatment of saints, male and female; some of them ideots, many of them murderers, most of them mad, all unblessed with Christian charity. They fear and adore these saints; pray to these saints; compliment the saints with offerings and divine praises; ascribe divine attributes, power and miracles to these saints; yet deny that they worship saints.

Methinks that men thus omnipotent, possessed with power to damn and save, and enabled by the deity to make their maker, should condescend, for the conviction of gainsayers, to do some miracles of a lower and easier nature; such as the creating a fly, or ordering a dead insect to live; such as animating a corpse, as well as deifying a wafer; ordering a common lock to open, or a common door to shut, as readily as they do the mighty gates of heaven and hell; for these last are miracles which they pretend to work daily.

They indeed tell us of other miracles wrought by their saints; but

we desire to see them wrought. Nor can they with any face complain of our want of faith, whilst we reasonably complain of their want of miracles. What less than miracles can prove the miraculous power which they pretend to exercise, their marvellous mysteries, and incredible operations? If they can damn a heretic by a word, why not imprison and punish him by the same word? If they can open heaven to a suffering Catholic, perhaps imprisoned for the meritorious offence of committing treason for the service of the holy church, against an heretical state, why not order the prison doors to fly open, to the releasement of the pious Catholic, and to the confusion of his heretical judges and persecutors? Why not award heretics to death, by the word of command, as well as to hell? Why not command beretics to the stake and the gallows to burn or hang heretics? Such exertions of power and orthodoxy would soon frighten heresy out of the land, and re-establish the Catholic faith, unity and revenues, with renown and triumph.

A famous impostor amongst the Jews, and one of their messiahs (for the poor people have had many, and none without followers) Sabatai Sevi by name, the deliverer of Israel by profession, undertook to restore the whole nation to Canaan, with a high hand, and heavenly power and wonders. He gained easy belief and numerous adherents, some of them in the stile of prophets, confirming his divine mission, and foretelling miraculous effects and events forthwith to ensue. Great commotions followed; the Turkish divan was alarmed, and sent for the impostor: he was put in irons, yet still asserted his own divine character; though he, who was to release and re-establish a nation, could not release himself. His bewitched followers too still believed in him, averred what miracles he wrought, and prophesied that he was to dethrone the Grand Seignior, and even to drag him along in chains. That monarch ordered him into his presence, and with imperial brevity offered him his choice, either to work a present miracle, or to turn Turk, or to be empaled alive. Sabatai, unable to comply with the first, and not liking the third, made no scruple of the second; he declared himself a Mahometan without hesitation, and thenceforward laboured to convert the Jews to Mahometanism, a change he alledged necessarily previous to their final restoration. As a proof of the strange force of delusion, his followers still believed in him, even after such open, such avowed apostacy: they said Sabatai was carried up into heaven, and a dæmon had assumed the shape and white hair of the old man, on purpose to disgrace him.

Transubstantiation is the most wonderful miracle that ever was wrought; and if it be fale, the pretended authors of it are the greatest impostors that ever pretended to miracles, as all impostors do. I would only have such as pretend to maintain it, either to abjure their daring pretences, or to work a small miracle. If they perform any miracle before competent witnesses, we Protestants may venture to turn Papists if they can work none, we ought to expect their conversion to Protestantism. We have no authority but their word for the mighty miracle of transubstantiation; human reason and the five senses, which alone attest and confirm other miracles, contradict this. We offer them no painful alternative; we call for no impaling, no racks, nor dungeons; though these be their last and most conclusive atguments to us.

NUMBER 79.

The natural and dreadful Consequences attending the Success of the Rebellion.

In the midst of all our public difficulties, and the evils that threaten us (I hope only for a short time) it must give high joy, and equal hopes, to all Britons and Protestants, to behold such an universal, such an ardent spirit in Protestants and Britons, upon the present trial and exigency; with such a glorious abhorrence of the desperate attempts, and bloody designs, of our enemies abroad and at home.

The very attempt to change the government, is a proof of the excellence and freedom of the government. If our government were wretched and weak, and the subjects oppressed and miserable, France would be the first to support an oppressive government, and strengthen the oppression. As the administration is just, and the people free, France will never cease plotting and labouring the destruction of gov ernment and people. If in our present situation we are dreadful to France; if we thwart her perfidious counsels, and cripple her tyranny, will not France strive to disable, to enslave, and to ruin, her capital and most formidable foe ?

This is her present scheme; she is pursuing her interest, let us pursue ours; if she succeed, we are undone; if we prevail, she is sunk ; she must truckle to terms of our imposing; and thus humbling herself to her neighbours, whom she has long insulted, against all shame, and contrary to all faith, she must accept such a peace as they will grant her.

To carry her point, she chooses a person very proper for her purposes, if they succeed; but very proper likewise to mar their success, by letting us see our notorious and alarming danger, in imposing upon us for our king a nursling of the Pope, a pupil of her own, bred in Romish blind bigotry, nurtured in all the principles of lawless sway; one destitute of all property, subsisting by food and raiment from France, taught by his father and his own fate, to hate us; and now armed to punish us, or rather to destroy us.

It hath been truly observed, that whoever comes from banishment to sovereignty, will exercise it with infinite havoc and cruelty: he hath suffered supreme injury, and must be satisfied with equal vengeance. Whoever forced him out or kept him out, is his rightful victim: life and property are claimed together. Great property is always certain guilt in the eye of a tyrant; and it is easy to prove it forfeited, by calling the owner a traitor: what numberless sacrifices, what copious forfeitures, must this devoted nation furnish out? A nation almost all heretics; all enemies to the tyranny of France, thence all proper objects of slaughter and bondage; all accursed by Rome, therefore worthy of fire and extirpation.

We must even pay France for keeping this our enemy, for his education, and for all the efforts made for him against us; for her expense

and supplies in the last rebellion, in the present rebellion, and ever since the revolution; pay her for establishing him our tyrant, and ever afterwards as the deputy of France: for, if he do not enslave us, be cannot reign over us; and as he cannot enslave us, without the power of France, we must be slaves in reality, to France; in name, to her viceroy, who will have the honour to be the chief slave, and consequently the most contemptible, as all are who wear a crown by foreign permission, and reign by command.

To answer all the demands of France, all his own demands (which will still be as great and real, as if he were a real king) together with the demands of his needy and craving followers, who will plead their wants of wealth and land, as abundant titles to both, especially when forleited to the usurper by resistance and heresy; all the estates and treasure of heretics and rebels, will hardly suffice. Even the Bank of England, and all the public funds, are all justly liable to forfeiture, as they were established to keep him out, and to secure rebels and heretics against his coming in. What can be more obvious, what more tempting, to be so seized, and so distributed? What more agreeable to the maxims of France and Rome in particular, and to the maxims of Popish and arbitrary sway in general? The church preferments, so long possessed by an heretical clergy, the church lands, so sacrilegiously usurped by the heretical laity, gentry and nobility, will be hardly sufficient to gratify the hopes, and to compensate the merits of an army of confessors, holy men, who have laboured incessantly, wrote and railed, cursed the heretics, and starved for above half a century, in the blessed view of seeing an obstinate nation ruined, as well as damned Protestants in the flaines, and the holy church in triumph.

The old laws must likewise succumb and bend to new masters. Who will dare to hold up an act of Parliament against the mass? What heretic venture to plead for heretics? What Protestant lawyer (if any Protestant be left, or one Protestant law) will venture to affront the Pope, or a Popish sovereign, by defending liberty, law, and conscience, in opposition to powers who hold liberty to be rebellion, law to be treason, and conscience to be schismatical and damnable; all to be punished with a bigh hand, and instantly rooted out, or crushed by fire and sword?

A bloody host of robbers from the woods and bogs of Ireland, droves of savages from the rocks and caverns of the highlands, void of letters, and even of humanity, armed with ignorance, brutality, and barbarous zeal, must be turned into an army, to secure a violent establishment by acts of violence; crazy monks, without mercy or knowledge, must be our teachers, to instruct us in the guilt of Christian charity, and the danger of human reason: a new nobility of upstarts, fugitives, and outlaws, raised from obscurity, chiefly known for their barbarity, original Macs and O's shall swagger (I had almost said wallow) in the highest stations and dignities, bear the grandest titles, without being able to read them, and sink and defile them by wearing them. The old nobility must be extinguished, or beg, or perish; or, which is worse, be converts, and feed upon the bounty of an usurper, at least subsist at his mercy.

Such wide and wasting violence, and these dreadful changes, are rather certain than improbable. The invader knows, that all able, all

wealthy, all discerning men; all sober and religious men; all who love liberty sacred and civil, their property, their Bible, and their cunscience, must necessarily hate his person, and abhor his education, his principles and dependencies. They can never be safe till he be de feated: he can never thoroughly succeed 'till they be thoroughly des troved.

Confusion, extirpation, and massacre, are the known, the approved, the tried measures of Popery, and of Popish tyrants. They think that by cruelty to heretics, they do service to God and themselves: the more cruelty the more service. This principle justifies all rigour and acts of rage and perfidy, and even consecrates them all as holy and meritorious. Charles the IXth of France, in obedience to the dictates of his faith, by a long train of fair usage, kind words, and a thousand caresses to the Hugonots, deluded the heads of them to Paris; where he renewed and enlarged all his friendly professions, distinguished them as his most welcome guests at the wedding of his sister, betrothed to their chief, the king of Navarre; granted them many favours, and pretended to be guided by the counsels of their favourite leader, the celebrated admiral de Coligni. When he had thus drawn the principals of the religion together, and lulled them into due security (for when they were prepared and armed, a small number of them was dreadful to any number of their enemies) he ordered them all to be massacred at once, upon a signal given: he was himself a keen, instrument in the massacre. The tyrant, as cruel as faithless, not only animated and applauded the most eager murderers, but shot from his window such of the innocent betrayed victims as were like to escape their butchers, the raging Catholics. The carnage was pursued at the same hour all over France. An hundred thousand Protestants fell sacrifices to the moloch of Popery, and to the maxims of French tyranny. The Pope, one of the ablest that ever filled the papal chair, but still a Pope, approved all the bloody guilt, all the internal slaughter, and particularly the murder of Coligni, one of the first heads in Christendom for wat and counsel, but unpardonably zealous for the gospel of Christ, and the rights of men.

In one of the Croisades against the Waldenses, two hundred thousand souls in one city were doomed at once to sword and fire, though many of them were Papists. The lay commander, a man of great quality, was for saving those of his own communion; but a monk commissioned by the Pope, insisted that the slaughter should be general, and left to God the care of his own.

What was the Irish massacre, but an effort of Irish papists, to restore popery? Popery, and the spirit of Popery, is still the same. King James, in Ireland enabled the wild bigoted Irish, the old murderers in the year 1641, or their murdering descendants, universally to plunder the Protestants there, to divest them of land, dwelling, and daily bread, and to force numbers of them to starve, or to beg their bread in England and Scotland. It was natural to fear that the worst was not past, that the lives of Protestants would soon follow their property, and another carnage would complete the restoration of Popery. The king, who had weakness enough to go such dreadful lengths, had bigotry enough the most mischievous weakness of all !) to have gone lengths still more