A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures

...declaration. Wherein you may plainly see, if you do not willfully hoodwink your own eyes, that the holy, pretended, hot zeal of the fiery spirits from Rome is the mere heathenish juggling of Baal’s priests. They do it to devour your goods, lands, and patrimonies, the rights of your posterity, and the ancient monuments of your name. They do it to defraud your children of their bread and cause you to offer it to impure dogs, to enrich their own cloisters, colleges, and churches with the spoils of your desolation. They do it to defile your chaste houses, pollute your tender virgins, and to deprave and inveigle your own wives lying in your bosoms—especially by that poisonous engine of hypocritical Confession—and finally, to offer you up as a prey to that Monster of Rome, the head of all unnatural and detestable rebellion.

And that this declaration might be free from the carp and cavil of ill-affected or discomposed spirits, I have alleged nothing for material or authentic herein but the express words of either some part of the Miracle Book, penned by the priests and filed upon record (where it is public to be seen), or else a clause of their confession who were fellow-actors in this impious dissimulation. Their several confessions and contestations (the parties being yet living) are here published in print, that the world may be a witness of our integrity. All which had been long ere this offered to your equal consideration, but that the Miracle Book came but lately to hand, and the getting of four chief demoniacs together—besides many more assistants, being persons of that quality and condition—was a matter of some pains and travel to effect.

If the form and phrase be distasteful to some cloudy spirits, as too light and ironical for one of my profession, let the matter be my advocate, which draws me thereunto, and the manner my apology a little too; trusting I may be excused for jesting at their jesting, who have made a jest of God and of his blessed Saints in heaven. If I have wittingly falsified or feigned any thing out of that book of wonders, may God do so to me, and more, for doing them so much wrong. But if all...