and best friends of the Church of England. It was soon followed by another, called the Oxford, or the Five Mile Act. By this "It was enacted," says Hume, "that no dissenting teacher, who took not the non-resistance oath above mentioned, should, except upon the road, come with. in five miles of any corporation, or of any place, where he had preached after the act of oblivion. The penalty was a fine of fifty pounds, and six months imprisonment. By ejecting the non-conformist ministry from their churches, and prohibiting all separate congregations, they had been rendered incapable of gaining any livelihood by their spiritual profession. And now, under colour of removing them from places, where their influence might be dangerous, an expedient was fallen upon to deprive them of all means of subsistence. Had not the spirit of the nation undergone a change, these violences were preludes to the most furious persecution." The Act against Conventicles was likewise added to the other injuries done to dissenters. By this act, every person who was present in a dissenting assembly, where more than five were present, besides the family, was to be fined five shillings for the first offence, ten for the second; the preacher twenty pounds for the first offence, and forty for the second. The person in whose house the assembly met was to be fined in the same sum as the preacher. It was also enacted that should any dispute arise with regard to any part of the act, the judges should always explain it in the sense least favourable to conventicles, it being the intention of Parliament entirely to suppress them. "Such was the zeal of the Commons," says the writer formerly quoted,

• History of England, Vol. vii, p. 351.

"that they violated the plainest and most established max. ims of civil policy, which require that, in all criminal prosecutions, favour should always be given to the prisoner."* When the spirit and letter of the law breathed such injustice and tyranny, it is no wonder that the execution sometimes out-did the statutes themselves. The trials of Mr. Penn and of Mr. Baxter afford sufficient evidence that the fury of the Bench exceeded even the violence of the Parliament. The records of these scenes, and of such as the history of the Presbyterian Parliament presents, ought ever to be preserved by Englishmen, not for the purpose of loading one party with crimes, and exculpating another, but that all may equally hate tyranny and persecution, in every party,—and that all may appreciate the blessings of our free constitution, which venerates our liberties, both civil and religious, and secures the dispensation of righteous and merciful laws, in a righteous and merciful manner.

The succession of a Popish Prince, in the person of James, and the obvious tendency of all his measures to subvert the Church Establishment, awakened the reflecting part of that body to a sense of their real danger, and recalled them from imaginary alarms, to consolidate a fabric attacked on all sides, and threatening a fall. The Dissenters, who refused to take the oath of non-resistance, had, in the former reign, suffered very severe penalties; and a bill had passed the House of Lords to oblige the members of both houses, and all who held any office, to swear to the doctrine of passive obedience. Had this bill received the sanction of the legislature, (and as the whole

VOL. II.

• History of England, Vol. vii, p. 369.

Y

strength of the Church was exerted to carry it, nothing but the quarrel that took place between the two houses, could probably have thrown it out,) the ruin of the religious establishment, or national perjury, must have been the certain consequence; while James exerted the force of his prerogative to destroy it, and the hands of the other two branches of the legislature, and of every man in power, were tied up from defending it. So nearly had these mad measures brought the Church herself to the brink of a fatal precipice, that she owed her escape to her revolt from those very maxims which, with so much zeal, she had endeavoured, during the whole of the last reign, to impose upon the nation. By the united efforts of Churchmen and Dissenters she was, with difficulty rescued, by opposing a steady resistance to the plan that James had formed for her subversion, and for overthrowing the liberties of the country.

Writers who have animadverted on the perturbid times of the three reigns which preceded the Revolution, have, according to their different prejudices, been fired with indignation at the inroads of prerogative on the liberties of the subject; the subservience of the Church to the doctrines of political tyranny, and her intolerant spirit to those who separated, or who wished to separate from her communion: or they have denounced the outrages of popular assemblies against the divine right of Princes; the usurpation of Puritans and Separatists, and their subversion of Church and State, as the most flagrant énormities. Writers of the former class delight to dwell on the misconduct of the First Charles; his arbitrary government; his forced loans; ship money; his violation of the Petition of Right; the severity and cruelty of the StarChamber and High Commission Courts; his ruling without

Parliaments; the attempts of the Church to destroy the liberties of the Kingdom by raising the King above the law; and her relentless persecution of those who, for conscience sake, dissented from her. They also take care to fill the most prominent part of the picture with the persecuting edicts, and the unrelenting cruelties of Charles the Second's reign, which were prepared and exercised by the Church party: but the tyranny and sanguinary spirit of the Long Parliament, in the prosecution of Strafford and Laud; its destructive ambition, in seizing the legitimate prerogatives of the Crown; dethroning their Monarch, overturning the Church, proscribing her worship, and persecuting her Ministers, the hypocrisy and fanaticism which closed the scene, they either throw into the back ground, or pass over in silence. The other class of writers begin their History of Charles the First's reign, with the meeting of the Long Parliament. The acts of tyranny and oppression, which for several years preceded it, and rendered the meeting of that Assembly necessary; the arbitrary courts they abolished; the bul warks they opposed to despotic power; the security they gave to personal liberty; the rash and ill-advised conduct of Charles in the accusation of the five members, &c. are all either left out of the historic picture, or so shaded as not to attract the notice of the spectator. But the hand of an honest painter, to whom the violences of all parties are equally obnoxious, and who wishes particularly to warn and instruct that party to which, upon the whole, his attachments are the strongest, will neither seek to soften its errors, nor to apologize for its crimes; but will give them the strongest colouring, that they may be distinctly seen and avoided, as dangerous rocks, by the pres ent and the future ages.

The absurd idea, that any system of civil or religious opinions is accountable for the follies or crimes of those who have been its professors, seems to be the mistake that lies at the bottom of all the mis-statements, which proceed from the partiality, or from the want of penetration of many political, as well as of many Ecclesiastical writers. If, in former ages, the religious doctrines of the Church of England were, accidentally, employed to destroy liberty, and to support arbitrary government; if they were disgraced by intolerance, when almost every other religious party was infected by the same pestilential disease, these circumstances can be no reproach to those principles, now that they are allied with a free state, and have extended their boughs to shelter and to shade men of every religious denomination.-If, in other times, Presbyterians have been inclined to democratical doctrines, and have promoted rebellion against a government which denied them the rights of conscience, and which they thought incompatible with civil liberty; if, at that time, they fell into the common absurdity of refusing to others, the religious rights they demanded for themselves, what concern have Presbyterians of later times, who, ever since they enjoyed the privileges and liberties of men, have exhibited the most steady loyalty, and the strongest attachment to the government of their country? They are only so far concerned as to lament the crimes and follies of all parties, and to abhor those which stained the conduct of such as professed their principles, as much as they do the crimes and follies of any other party. If the doctrines of the Independents were, at one time, united with levelling and republican maxims; if some persons of that society were among the regicides of Charles the First; if the leaders of that party, in acquiring political ascendency,