pense and labour; for the cattle go of themselves to the places where one would have them, and so save carriage. 5. It is also known that cattle, when they feed, are at work for their owner, without any need of his being present with them; so that he may apply himself to some other thing, 6. A little meat with bread nourishes better than three times as much bread alone. 51:11: 16 ཟླ 7. Cattle give rise to abundance of important manufactures, that employ and afford subsistence to great numbers of people; such as wools, hides, horns, suet, butter, cheese, &c. 8. This want of cattle makes meat dear to those employed in manufactures and other handicrafts; as also to merchants, whom it costs a great deal more to victual their ships. 9. It likewise occasions the dearness of candle, butter, cheese, hides, wool, &c. in a country, which is a hindrance to mechanics, trade, and propagation, and makes other provisions dearer, in general, than in those countries where that superstition is unknown. It particularly occasions the dearness of bread, because the people, for want of flesh-meat, are obliged to eat abundance of bread. This want of cattle occasions also the laying out of great sums in foreign rice, hides, suet, butter, cheese, and fat or grease for coaches, and other carriages. 10. These extravagant superstitions are the cause of maladies and distempers, languishings, and of the death of an infinite number of poor people, and of infirm, aged, and scrupulous persons, to whom meat would be more proper than any thing else; and yet they cannot have that relief, because they either cannot or will not give it them, or that they dare not eat it, because of the scruples which the idolatrous priests have formed in their minds; so that they suffer extremely during that time, and many more people die in that season than in others. This Lent falls, likewise, precisely out at a time when the husbandman, and other country people, labour very hard, digging their vines, dunging their ground, sowing their March corn, and manuring their gardens; so that the peasants are in much worse condition to work when ill-fed, not being allowed to eat flesh-meat, and their garden-stuff being spoiled by the hard frosts in the winter. 11. Besides, Lent falls just at the end of winter, when the poor,, sickly, and old people have suffered more than they do ordinarily at other seasons; and, instead of recovering strength, as they would, or might do, were they allowed to eat such good meat, as the season affords, as fresh eggs, lamb, veal, kids, pigs, &c.; instead of that, the Lent completes their ruin, and kills them. 12. Lent, and their other pretended fast-days, and their monks and nuns who never eat flesh, destroy all the fish in the rivers, without a possibility of being stocked again, nay, they hinder 1 those of the very ponds from coming to maturity or a proper growth. 13. It occasions abundance of people to lose their time by fishing in those rivers, without almost catching any thing; because they will have fish, and can have no other but such. 25 14. Lent occasions the loss of the advantage and income of eggs, which are good at that time, and they do not know, what use to put them to; and, after Lent, they are either too old or of no value. 15. It is a shame to human nature to see those excesses which the poor idolatrous Papists are guilty of during the time of the Carnival, when they conceive they have a privilege to dishonour, violate, and degrade their nature, by all sorts of infamy, excess, and disorders; and by their masquerades, and changing the habit of their sex, to make themselves amends for being condemned by their priests to eat no flesh during Lent: and, when that is over, they believe themselves authorised again to commit the like riots at Easter; which is so much the more dangerous to the health of many people, because they fed slenderly before, in hopes of being sooner delivered from the fire of purgatory after their death. 16. Lent and other fast days, which the priests command them to observe, on pain of eternal damnation, makes them disrelish and loath all sea and shell-fish, and are the cause that there are fewer mariners and fishermen than otherwise there would be; because people do, without comparison, eat much less of sea-fish than otherwise they would do and by this means the kingdom loses a great advantage, and an inestimable revenue, which Nature presents to them with very little trouble and charge. 17 The country people, throughout the whole kingdom, lose abundance, in the time of Lent, of what they might reap from their calves, lambs, kids, pigs, and other young animals that are bred during that time, and haye, for the most part, need of the milk of their dams; for either the peasants must dispense with the want of that milk, which does highly incommode them, or else they must throw part of those ereatures to the dogs. They lose also by their poultry, which they can neither eat nor sell, and yet must keep them, though many times they have not corn to feed them. 29. 18. The country people many times lose part of their great and small cattle by the Lent; for, if the winter be long, and the spring backward, and they have not gathered together abundance of forage the foregoing year, their cattle die of hunger, which would not be the case if they were either allowed to sell them to the butcher, or to eat them themselves. 19. The peasant, not daring to eat either flesh or eggs, because he is forbidden to eat them under the notion of a great sin, and having no fish to eat, because it is scarce and dear, nor roots nor berbs, because the winter has destroyed them, is obliged to maintain himself by the milk of cows, which occasions their calves being starved, and is partly the cause why the cattle are so poor in France; and this occasions an incredible prejudice to the kingdom. de nom, thank pode 20. There is more counterfeit devotion at that time than at others, which exhausts the purses, and wastes the time, of these e poor ignorant people. I say nothing of those monstrous opinions, unworthy of God and man, which these base and foolish superstic tions nourish and maintain, as if it were more pleasing to God to see people eat fish or pulse than to eat flesh," and at one time rather than another. I tad 19 For all these reasons above-mentioned, and others, I make no scruple to say that the keeping of Lent does above 50,000,000 of livres prejudice to the kingdom of France per annuitica to erst And, being upon this subject, it may not, perhaps, be unseasonable to confute the errors of those who fancy that Lent and other fast days are advantageous to a nation; because, say they, it saves the cattle, puts many people upon fishing, and, consequently, to the getting of more profit by sea than they would otherwise do, and by that means also, more seamen are bred. I confess that Lent and feast-days are useful to some nations, not by observing them themselves, but by selling fish to those who do so, as the English, Scotch, Dutch, &c. who furnish the French and other Catholic nations with them. England was quickly sensible that the keeping of Lent was a mistake in politics; for, after Lent had been observed by her for some time after the Reformation, on pretence of some such polie! 6 tical reasons, as the encouragement of fishing, &c. it was soom Y left off, because the Government found it did more hurt than good. They saw it did not in increase the number of seamen, but s rather diminished them; and that there was not more fish taken » and spent, but rather less, because that people, being under this compulsion, were disgusted with it, and did eat it against their will upon the very fish-days, and could not at all endure it at other times: whereas, now they eat it at all times indifferently; and there is constantly a good store of all sorts to be found at the t • A jolly friar dining one day at an inu, in company with some of the same order, during Lent, ate very heartily of bacon and eggs, when one of them reproved » bim for committing so sinful an act; whereupon he immediately wrote the following jines extempore: 2597 70 Jaol goed bedoel Almighty vengeancel Wrapt up in majesty divine, disarms A EDITOR. Does he regard on what we dine ?'" fishmongers, as well sea as fresh-water fish, and all sorts of shell.. fish: so that now those who love fish better than meat may please themselves, which they could not do if they were tyrannically commanded to do it. Besides, fishermen could not then make their constant trade of fishing but only in Lent, and about Fridays and Saturdays; whereas now they both can and do fish actually every day. Its true, France does not afford such plenty of fleshmeat as England gobat this must also be granted, that the people in France, who have means, do not feed so much upon meat, even on flesh-days, as they call them, as the English commonly do; and, besides, most part of the French have not wherewith to do it. But I say further, that France is in greater want of fish than of flesh, and that there would have been flesh enough in the nation if Lent, the four Ember-Weeks, and other fast-days, and the orders of monks and nuns, had not been set up by superstition; for this occasioned a neglect in breeding of cattle: and even at present though most of the kingdom lies desolate, there wouldbe cattle enough, if Lent were abolished, and lands not abandoned,bas 2012! algosq que More fish would be eaten in the French sea-ports, and other places near the sea, than is eaten at present, if it were not for the tyrannous impositions upon men's consciences, which forbid them to eat meat at such times, and create, in most part of them, a kind of abhorrency of fish, which they are forced to eat and hence a less quantity of fish is taken in the sea-ports than there would be, were it not for this superstition; and less cattle are also bred in the country than would be, were it not for the same abuse, which forbids the eating of meat above five months in the year and so puts all things out of order; for, by this means, those that live near the sea are disgusted at fish, which Nature and Providence affords them very cheap, nay, almost for nothing; which would be a great treasure to them, if it were not for the tyranny imposed upon them and those who live in remote places of the , and have an opportunity to breed abundance of cattle, and eat meat very cheap, are forced to abstain from it, and lose that great advantage, though they cannot have fish but at a very dear rate.ɔd of encéus to stoja boog wyhee It deserves likewise our observation, that France has lost considerably in respect of the profits they made of their cattle, by the expulsion of the Protestants, because they bought, in Lent, the young cattle, poultry, &c. in the towns and countries where they lived, which otherwise had been lost, or very chargeable to the owners. relates to the injustice, violence, and spiritual tyranny of the Popish clergy, which cause an inestimable damage to the king dom of France av This spirit, which is essential to Popery, was the cause of the last was, which they kindled secretly, and of the last persecution, and of all the massacres and civil wars that have ever been in France. This same spirit of violence sets them, whenever they meet with princes obnoxious to them, to persecute all those with the utmost fury that differ from them in their opi nions, though they have no other foundation for them but their own ambition, pride, and covetousness; this spirit, I say, of injustice has been one of the great causes of the ruin of France. I leave it to the world to judge whether they did not take advantage of the ambition of that potent prince, who was perhaps possessed with the design of an universal monarchy, to make him believe that it was convenient for him, in order to attain his end, to destroy the Reformation in England, Holland, France, and all other parts: and, under that pretence, to bring King James, who was known to be a bigotted prince, into the same designy and to oblige him to do all that we know he did. It is by such methods as these that the Court of Rome ruins all the princes and States of Europe, when she is any way afraid that they will grow too potent for her interest. I shall not offer to compute the damage done by this article at any certain sum of money; for every one may easily perceive that this is a fountain of innumerable mischiefs. n ARTICLE XIV. shows plainly how ruinous the Popish clergy are to the state of France in this, that they contribute little to the great charge of the nation, though they enjoy the half of all estates, real and personal, of the kingdom; and ought, consequently, to pay as much tax as those do, who possess the other half of the kingdom. For the clergy, even at present, scarcely pay 10,000,000 of livres towards the 200,000,000 which the King hath exacted every year from the nation, one way or other, since the war. Thus the clergy of France enjoy as much revenue as 8 or 9,000,000 of other people, who may still be reckoned to be in the kingdom of France, or as much as was enjoyed by 13 or 14,000,000, who might have been in it thirty years ago; and though each of the clergy has as much to spend now, in relation to the revenue of the real and personal estates, as forty or fifty other persons of ordinary life, yet the clergy and those religious orders, taken in bulk, do not bear above the twentieth part of the charges of the government. W 19UTED 6 nedt mob The clergy are not only free from all those mischiefs and losses of money and time, to which the other subjects are liable, but they likewise get money from the people, and plunder them by Louis the XIVth. |