50.  When you come to HISTORY, begin also with that of your own country; and here it is my bounden duty to put you well on your guard; for in this respect we are peculiarly unfortunate, and for the following reasons, to which I beg you to attend.  Three hundred years ago, the religion of England had been, during nine hundred years, the Catholic religion:  the Catholic clergy possessed about a third part of all the lands and houses, which they held in trust for their own support, for the building and repairing of churches, and for the relief of the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the stranger; but, at the time just mentioned, the king and the aristocracy changed the religion to Protestant, took the estates of the church and the poor to themselves as their own property, and taxed the people at large for the building and repairing of churches and for the relief of the poor.  This great and terrible change, effected partly by force against the people and partly by the most artful means of deception, gave rise to a series of efforts, which has been continued from that day to this, to cause us all to believe, that that change was for the better, that it was for our good; and that, before that time, our forefathers were a set of the most miserable slaves that the sun ever warmed with his beams.  It happened, too, that the art of printing was not discovered, or, at least, it was very little understood, until about the time when this change took place; so that the books relating to former times were confined to manuscript; and, besides, even these manuscript libraries were destroyed with great care by those who had made the change and had grasped the property of the poor and the church.  Our ‘Historians,’ as they are called, have written under fear of the powerful, or have been bribed by them; and, generally speaking, both at the same time; and, accordingly, their works are, as far as they relate to former times, masses of lies unmatched by any others that the world has ever seen.

51.  The great object of these lies always has been to make the main body of the people believe, that the nation is now more happy, more populous, more powerful, than it was before it was Protestant, and thereby to induce us to conclude, that it was a good thing for us that the aristocracy should take to themselves the property of the poor and the church, and make the people at large pay taxes for the support of both.  This has been, and still is, the great object of all those heaps of lies; and those lies are continually spread about amongst us in all forms of publication, from heavy folios down to halfpenny tracts.  In refutation of those lies we have only very few and rare ancient books to refer to, and their information is incidental, seeing that their authors never dreamed of the possibility of the lying generations which were to come.  We have the ancient acts of parliament, the common-law, the customs, the canons of the church, and the churches themselves; but these demand analyses and argument, and they demand also a really free press, and unprejudiced and patient readers.  Never in this world, before, had truth to struggle with so many and such great disadvantages!