“That the Church of Rome has shed more innocent blood than any other institution which has ever existed among mankind will be questioned by no Protestant who has a competent knowledge of history.

It is sometimes urged on the other side that ‘the Protestants were as bad.’ If this means that there was a time when many Protestants still believed that it was right for the church to suppress a false teachings by force, and even to call on the State to execute the heretic, the saying is true. But its force is turned by two considerations. The first is that the Protestants had not unlearned all the false doctrines with which they had been familiar in Catholicism. The whole of the new truth which had been shut up in the Gospel was not at once made plain to them. Some of it, indeed, remained undiscovered for three centuries or more. The fact that slavery is in utter contradiction to the will of God is an exact parallel. But Protestants discovered the duty of toleration long before they discovered the iniquity of slaveholding. The second consideration is that, whereas Protestants long ago repented and do still repent of such persecution as must be laid to the charge of their forefathers, no Catholic authority, corporate or individual, has ever expressed repentance or remorse for the Church’s part in instigating massacres and maintaining the Inquisition.” (C. Anderson Scott, Romanism and the Gospel, 1946, p.170-171)