was rarely in a position to forge. But he would not present facts damaging to his client, and he had the skills that enabled him to arrange the evidence so as to make it conform to what he wanted it to say. Like the barrister, Foxe presents crucial evidence and tells a side of the story which must be heard, but his text should never be read uncritically, and his partisan objectives should always be kept in mind." By the end of the 17th century, however, the work tended to be abbreviated to include only "the most sensational episodes of torture and death" thus giving to Foxe's work "a lurid quality which was certainly far from the author's intention." It is true that Acts and Monuments "tended to be abbreviated". The second part of the claim, however, is in error. It could be simply deleted as an error, but it repeats and elaborates William Haller's second thesis as if a fact, that the later Foxe-derived abridgements had lost entirely intellect's levening influence. (The "Elect Nation" was Haller's first thesis). Haller read through some of the Foxe-derived martyrologies, editions by Martin Madan, John Milner and John Wesley, and observed "a progressive corruption and vulgarization of the original for the propagation of an increasingly narrow Protestant piety". William Haller did not refer to "sensational episodes of torture and death", nor did he report on any texts reduced "only" to such matter. Neither has any specific edition been exhibited as proof, yet, it is conventionally believed and so frequently asserted that Sydney Lee, and Thomas Freeman after him, state it as a true overgeneralization. Thus, it should not be deleted as a simple error in fact, even if it is wrong. A scan of the titles for Foxe-derived editions make the claim unlikely, and Reflexive Foxe: The 'Book of Martyrs' Transformed, prove it false; findings supported by Haller and Wooden's less comprehensive glimpses into the later abridgments. Acts and Monuments was cannibalized for material to warn of the dangers of Catholicism and, in Foxe's name, also to undermine resurgent High Church Anglicanism. The author's credibility and the text's reliability became suspect, then, for both Catholic and Anglican Church defenders. Samuel Roffey Maitland, Richard Frederick Littledale as well as Robert Parsons and John Milner, mounted campaigns to disprove Foxe's findings. Maitland's and others' critiques helped to awaken increasing antagonism toward intolerance in the public