to taming or binding a savage animal, the best service you can do the neighbourhood, is to give them warning either to arm themselves, or not come in its way.

Could I have hoped for any signs of remorse from the leaders of that faction, I should very gladly have changed my style, and forgot, or passed by, their million of enormities. But they are every day more fond of discovering their impotent zeal and malice; witness their conduct in the city about a fortnight ago, which had no other end imaginable, beside that of perplexing our affairs, and endeavouring to make things desperate, that themselves may be thought necessary. While they continue in this frantic mood, I shall not forbear to treat them as they deserve; that is to say, as the inveterate irreconcileable enemies to our country and its constitution.

No. XXXIX.

THURSDAY, MAY 3, 1711.

Quis tulerit Gracchos de seditione querentes?

in vain

The Gracchi of sedition will complain.

THERE have been certain topics of reproach liberally bestowed, for some years past, by the Whigs and Tories, upon each other. We charge the former with a design of destroying the established church, and introducing fanaticism and freethinking in its stead. We accuse them as enemies to monarchy; as endeavouring to undermine

the present form of government, and to build a commonwealth, or some new scheme of their own, upon its ruins. On the other side, their clamours against us may be summed up in those three formidable words, Popery, Arbitrary Power, and the Pretender. Our accusations against them we endeavour to make good by certain overt acts; such as their perpetually abusing the whole body of the clergy; their declared contempt for the very order of priesthood; their aversion against episcopacy ; the public encouragement and patronage they give to Tindal, Toland, and other atheistical writers; their appearing as professed advocates retained by the dissenters, excusing their separation, and laying the guilt of it to the obstinacy of the church; their frequent endeavours to repeal the test, and their setting up the indulgence to scrupulous consciences, as a point of greater importance than the established worship. The regard they bear to our monarchy has appeared by their openly ridiculing the martyrdom of King Charles I. in their calves-head clubs, their common discourses, and their pamphlets; their denying the unnatural war raised against that prince to have been a rebellion; their justifying his murder in the allowed papers of the week; their industry in publishing and spreading seditious and republican tracts, such as Ludlow's Memoirs, Sidney on Government, and many others; their endless lopping of the prerogative, and mincing into nothing her majesty's titles to the crown.

What proofs they bring for our endeavouring to introduce Popery, arbitrary power, and the Pretender, I cannot readily tell, and would be glad to hear; however, these important words having, by dexterous management, been found of mighty service to their cause;

although applied with little colour either of reason or justice; I have been considering whether they may not be adapted to more proper objects.

As to Popery, which is the first of these; to deal plainly, I can hardly think there is any set of men among us, except the professors of it, who have any direct intention to introduce it here; but the question is, whether the principles and practices of us, or the Whigs, be most likely to make way for it? It is allowed on all hands, that among the methods concerted at Rome, for bringing over England into the bosom of the Catholic church, one of the chief was to send Jesuits, and other emissaries, in lay habits; who, personating tradesmen and mechanics, should mix with the people, and, under the pretence of a farther and purer reformation, endeavour to divide us into as many sects as possible; which would either put us under the necessity of returning to our old errors, to preserve peace at home; or, by our divisions, make way for some powerful neighbour, with the assistance of the Pope's permission, and a consecrated banner, to convert and enlsave us at once. If this has been reckoned good politics, (and it was the best the Jesuit schools could invent,) I appeal to any man, whether the Whigs, for many years past, have not been employed in the very same work? They professed on all occasions, that they knew no reason why any one system of speculative opinions (as they term the doctrines of the church) should be established by law more than another; or why employments should be confined to the religion of the magistrate, and that called the church established. The grand maxim they laid down was, that no man, for the sake of a few notions and ceremonies, under the names of doctrine and discipline, should be denied the liberty of serving

his country as if places would go a begging unless Brownists, Familists, Sweet-singers, Quakers, Anabaptists, and Muggletonians, would take them off our hands.

I have been sometimes imagining this scheme brought to perfection, and how diverting it would be to see half a dozen Sweet-singers on the bench in their ermines, and two or three Quakers with their white staves at court. I can only say, this project is the very counterpart of the late King James's design, which he took up as the best method for introducing his own religion, under the pretext of a universal liberty of conscience, and that no difference in religion should make any in his favour. Accordingly, to save appearances, he dealt some employments among dissenters of most denominations; and what he did was, no doubt, in pursuance of the best advice he could get at home or abroad; but the church thought it the most dangerous step he could take for her destruction. It is true King James admitted Papists among the rest, which the Whigs would not: but this is sufficiently made up by a material circumstance, wherein they seem to have much outdone that prince, and to have carried their liberty of conscience to a higher point, having granted it to all the classes of Freethinkers, (which the nice conscience of a Popish prince would not give him leave to do,) and were therein mightily overseen; because it is agreed by the learned, that there is but a very narrow step from atheism to the other extreme, superstition. So that, upon the whole, whether the Whigs had any real design of bringing in Popery or not, it is very plain that they took the most effectual step toward it; and if the Jesuits had been their immediate directors, they could not have taught them better, nor have found apter scholars.

Their second accusation is, that we encourage and maintain arbitrary power in princes; and promote enslaving doctrines among the people. This they go about to prove by instances; producing the particular opinions of certain divines in King Charles II.'s reign, a decree of Oxford university, and some few writers since the Revolution. What they mean is the principle of passive obedience and non-resistance, which those who affirm did, I believe, never intend should include arbitrary power. However, although I am sensible that it is not reckoned prudent in a dispute to make any concessions, without the last necessity; yet I do agree, that, in my own private opinion, some writers did carry that tenet of passive obedience to a height which seemed hardly consistent with the liberties of a country, whose laws can neither be enacted nor repealed without the consent of the whole people: I mean not those who affirm it due in general, as it certainly is, to the legislature; but such as fix it entirely in the prince's person. This last has, I believe, been done by a very few; but when the Whigs quote authors to prove it upon us, they bring in all who mention it as a duty in general, without applying it to princes abstracted from their senate.

By thus freely declaring my own sentiments of passive obedience, it will at least appear that I do not write for a party; neither do I upon any occasion pretend to speak their sentiments, but my own. The majority of the two Houses and the present ministry (if those be a party) seem to me in all their proceedings to pursue the real interest of church and state; and if I should happen to differ from particular persons among them in a single notion about government, I suppose they will not, upon that account, explode me and my paper. However, as