If I am ever
to bow my neck beneath the Church's yoke, let me swallow the warm-blooded
errors of Papacy rather than the heartless formalism of English
Episcopacy."
"But what can you or Fareham--or a few good men like you--do to change
established things? Remember Venner's plot, and how many lives were wasted
on that foolish, futile attempt. You can only hazard your lives, die on the
scaffold. Or would you like to see civil war again; the nation divided into
opposite camps; Englishmen fighting with Englishmen? Can you forget that
dreadful last year of the Rebellion? I was only a little child; but it is
branded deep on my memory. Can you forget the murder of the King? He was
murdered; let Mr. Milton defend the deed as he can with his riches of big
words. I have wept over the royal martyr's own account of his sufferings."
"Over Dr. Gauden's account, that is to say. 'Eikon Basilike' was no more
written by Charles than by Cromwell. It was a doctored composition--a
churchman's spurious history, trumped up by Charles's friends and
partisans, possibly with the approval of the King himself. It is a fine
piece of special pleading in a bad cause."
"You make me hate you when you talk so slightingly of that so ill-used
King.
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