Note 16 — A REPLY TO THE ESSAY ON POPULATION BY THE REV. T. R. MALTHUS In a Series of Letters. To which are added, Extracts from the Essay, with Notes (continued 3)

I should like to know whether Mr. Malthus would go so far as to say that all the wars and rebellions occasioned by religion, that all the plots, assassinations, burnings, massacres, the persecutions, feuds, animosities, hatreds and jealousy of different sects, that the cruelty, bigotry, the pernicious customs, and abominable practices of the Pagan and other superstitions, such as human sacrifices, &c. whether all those mischiefs and enormities of which religion has been made a tool, whether the martyrdom of the first christians, the massacre of St. Bartholomew, the fires of Smithfield, the expeditions to the holy land, the Gunpowder Plot, the Inquisition, the long Parliament, the Reformation and the Revolution,—Popery, Protestantism, monks, eremites, and friars, with all their trumpery’ were the offspring of the principle of population.