Roman Catholic cruelties/Chapter 1
ROMAN CATHOLIC
CRUELTIES.
At a time when the Papists of Britain are making vigorous and unwearied endeavours to procure for themselves equal rights and privileges with their heretical neighbours; it is requisite that the latter should know the true character of the former; their conduct in past times towards persons of their opinion at home and abroad; and the probable use which would be made of liberty by men, whose principles once stimulated their forefathers, to perpetrate such horrid cruelties on their fellow creatures, under the pretence of defending a religion, the author of which, the Bible says, "came to preach glad tidings to the meek, to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captive, and the opening of the prison to those that were bound." How opposite to all these characteristics of genuine Christianity has been the conduct of Papists, the pages of this pamphlet will show.
It is not for the purpose of heaping odium upon the persons of Papists now living, that these bloody deeds are recited, but, to shew the necessary tendency of their religious intolerance and bigotry. It is vain, that persons calling themselves the friends of freedom assert, that the intolerant principles of Papists have changed, as they have become enlightened. Popery is ever the same—or it is no longer the Roman Catholic religion;—it cannot change without being at variance with its own principles;—for it maintains its Popes infallible, and its faith unchanged, from the institution of Christianity to the present age. If Papists were bloody, cruel and deceitful, formerly—they say they never change—consequently, if they had power, their oath to extirpate heretics by all means, compels them to use the rack, the scaffold, and the gibbet, again to spread desolation and blood over our now happy land. In one word, if the Pope and his conclave have imbibed the tolerant spirit of the age, why are Jesuits again tolerated and patronized; and the cells of the Inquisition again yawning wide their murderous jaws, to swallow all that is noble and intellectual, and pious, in the degraded land of Spain.
The following pages have been compiled from a larger work, and gives a brief but faithful account, of a few of the Persecutions endured by the Churches of Christ, in different ages of the world.