The History of England from the Accession of James II, vol 2 | Page 6

the King should wish to obtain for the Church
to which he belonged a complete toleration was natural and right; nor is
there any reason to doubt that, by a little patience, prudence, and justice,
such a toleration might have been obtained.
The extreme antipathy and dread with which the English people
regarded his religion was not to be ascribed solely or chiefly to
theological animosity. That salvation might be found in the Church of
Rome, nay, that some members of that Church had been among the
brightest examples of Christian virtue, was admitted by all divines of
the Anglican communion and by the most illustrious Nonconformists.
It is notorious that the penal laws against Popery were strenuously
defended by many who thought Arianism, Quakerism, and Judaism

more dangerous, in a spiritual point of view, than Popery, and who yet
showed no disposition to enact similar laws against Arians, Quakers, or
Jews.
It is easy to explain why the Roman Catholic was treated with less
indulgence than was shown to men who renounced the doctrine of the
Nicene fathers, and even to men who had not been admitted by baptism
within the Christian pale. There was among the English a strong
conviction that the Roman Catholic, where the interests of his religion
were concerned, thought himself free from all the ordinary rules of
morality, nay, that he thought it meritorious to violate those rules if, by
so doing, he could avert injury or reproach from the Church of which
he was a member.
Nor was this opinion destitute of a show of reason. It was impossible to
deny that Roman Catholic casuists of great eminence had written in
defence of equivocation, of mental reservation, of perjury, and even of
assassination. Nor, it was said, had the speculations of this odious
school of sophists been barren of results. The massacre of Saint
Bartholomew, the murder of the first William of Orange, the murder of
Henry the Third of France, the numerous conspiracies which had been
formed against the life of Elizabeth, and, above all, the gunpowder
treason, were constantly cited as instances of the close connection
between vicious theory and vicious practice. It was alleged that every
one of these crimes had been prompted or applauded by Roman
Catholic divines. The letters which Everard Digby wrote in lemon juice
from the Tower to his wife had recently been published, and were often
quoted. He was a scholar and a gentleman, upright in all ordinary
dealings, and strongly impressed with a sense of duty to God. Yet he
had been deeply concerned in the plot for blowing up King, Lords, and
Commons, and had, on the brink of eternity, declared that it was
incomprehensible to him how any Roman Catholic should think such a
design sinful. The inference popularly drawn from these things was that,
however fair the general character of a Papist might be, there was no
excess of fraud or cruelty of which he was not capable when the safety
and honour of his Church were at stake.

The extraordinary success of the fables of Oates is to be chiefly
ascribed to the prevalence of this opinion. It was to no purpose that the
accused Roman Catholic appealed to the integrity, humanity, and
loyalty which he had shown through the whole course of his life. It was
to no purpose that he called crowds of respectable witnesses, of his own
persuasion, to contradict monstrous romances invented by the most
infamous of mankind. It was to no purpose that, with the halter round
his neck, he invoked on himself the whole vengeance of the God before
whom, in a few moments, he must appear, if he had been guilty of
meditating any ill to his prince or to his Protestant fellow countrymen.
The evidence which he produced in his favour proved only how little
Popish oaths were worth. His very virtues raised a presumption of his
guilt. That he had before him death and judgment in immediate
prospect only made it more likely that he would deny what, without
injury to the holiest of causes, he could not confess. Among the
unhappy men who were convicted of the murder of Godfrey was one
Protestant of no high character, Henry Berry. It is a remarkable and
well attested circumstance, that Berry's last words did more to shake
the credit of the plot than the dying declarations of all the pious and
honourable Roman Catholics who underwent the same fate.6
It was not only by the ignorant populace, it was not only by zealots in
whom fanaticism had extinguished all reason and charity, that the
Roman Catholic was regarded as a man the very tenderness of whose
conscience might make him a false witness, an incendiary, or a
murderer, as a man who, where his