Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/265

 the Royal Society as to what the fate was which the Church had in store for those whose inquiries were not stamped with the seal of ecclesiastical approval, and what might become of their deliberations if they had to obtain the prior approbation of the General of the Jesuits or the exequatur of the Queen's Confessor. Therefore, both as a man of science and a disciple of Hobbes, Sir William, while entirely free from the narrow bigotry of the Calvinistic Protestants, and anxious to improve the civil position of the Roman Catholics, knew, with the example of Italy and Spain before him, that the political supremacy of Roman Catholicism meant, at that period of the world's history, the entire destruction of liberty of thought.

In such a condition of affairs, the uncritical public opinion of the day was ready to accept almost any fable, however absurd, and to declare an implicit belief in the active existence, ready in a moment to stalk the streets, of 'a damnable and hellish plot, continued and carried on by Popish recusants, for assassinating the King, subverting the government, and rooting out and destroying the Protestant religion.' The exigencies of party strife made it necessary for the ministers and legal advisers of the Crown and the leaders of the opposition to vie with each other in professing to believe in perjuries repulsive to minds trained in public affairs and presumably able to distinguish between false and true testimony. Acting under the same pressure, the tribunals of the law, which till then had been occupied in harrying the Nonconformists of the humbler class, now transferred their attention to the judicial murder of Roman Catholics of rank and position. Soon a demand arose not only for precautions against open attack, and for the prosecution of the leaders of the Roman Catholic party in England, but also for violent measures against their coreligionists in Ireland, who were declared to be in accord with the authors of the plot in England, if not themselves among the actual instigators and authors.