Note, the honest Quaker was nonplussed, and greatly surprised at that question.

Quips, and cranks, and wanton wiles.

Nor could they forget the 200-odd priests massacred in the Paris prisons in September 1792, … or the 118 who never came back from the dry guillotine that was French Guiana.

They are (said he) meer phantoms of ignorance and credulity, swelled up in the repetition, like those unsubstantial bubbles which the boys blow up in sopasuds with a tobacco pipe.