Life & Wisdom Quote by John Foxe

Persecution, in Foxe's telling, is not an accident of bad rulers but a feature of the social order: once you're marked as religiously other, your suffering becomes normal, even respectable. The line is blunt on purpose. "A Protestant has seldom any mercy shown him" reads like a report from the front, written by someone who has watched "mercy" become a political resource rationed by the dominant church. Foxe isn't pleading for tolerance in the abstract; he's documenting how power trains people to treat certain bodies as unworthy of compassion.

The second clause sharpens the knife. A Jew who converts "is far from being secure" because conversion doesn't actually solve the problem Foxe wants you to see: religious identity in early modern Europe isn't just belief, it's blood, reputation, and inherited suspicion. He exposes the transactional lie at the heart of forced conformity: change your creed and you can live. No, you might still be hated, policed, and punished, because the stigma sticks even after the ritual of submission.

Context matters. Foxe, the Protestant martyrologist behind Acts and Monuments, writes in the aftermath of Mary's reign and its burnings, when English Protestant identity is being forged through stories of cruelty. His intent is polemical and mobilizing: to make Protestant vulnerability feel systemic and to frame Catholic authority as structurally incapable of mercy. The subtext is a warning to his own side, too: don't mistake temporary favor or formal conversion for safety when the machinery of persecution remains intact.