influence and oblige men unto that they not only entertain the greatest Abhorrency and Detestation imaginable for it but seem resolved not to cherish in their Bosom a thing so abominable to God execrable to good Men and destructive to Humane as well as to Christian Societies Nor are the Dissenters merely to believe that the Conformists are equally zealous as themselves for the Reformed Religion and English Rights but they are to consider them as thy only great and united Body of Protestants in the Kingdom with whom all other Parties compared bear no considerable proportion For tho the Nonconformists considered abstractedly make a vast number of honest and useful People yet being laid in the Scale with those of the Episcopal Communion they are but few and lie in a little room And whosoever will take the pains to ballance the one against the other even where the Fanaticks make the greatest Figure and may justly boast of their multitude they will soon be convinced that the number of the other doth far transcend and exceed them And it be so in Cities and Corporations where the greatest Bulk of Dissenters are it is much more so in Country Parishes where the latter bear not the proportion of one to a hundred Nor doth the Church of England more exceed the other Parties in her number than she doth in the Quality of her Members For whereas they who make up and constitute the separate Societies are chiefly persons of the middle Rank and Condition the Church of England doth in a manner vouch and claim all the Persons of Honor of the Learned Professions and such as have valuable Estates for her Communicants And though the other sort are as necessary in the Common-wealth and contribute as much to its Strength Prosperity and Happiness yet they make not that Figure in the Government nor stand in that capacity of having influence upon publick Affairs for not only the Gentlemen of both the Gowns who by reason of their Calling and Learning are best able to defend our Religion and vindicate our Laws and Privileges with their Tongues and Pens but they whose Estates Reputation and Interest recommendeth them to be elected Members of the great Senate of the Nation as well as they who by reason of their Honors and Baronages are hereditary Legislators are generally if not all of the Communion of the Church of England so that they who conform to the established Worship and Discipline are to be look'd upon and acknowledged as the great Bulwark of the Protestant Religion in England and the Hedge and Fence of our Civil Liberties and Rights And though it be true that this great breach made upon our Religion and Laws is fallen out under their hand while the poor Dissenters had neither accession to nor were in a condition to prevent it yet seeing their own Consciences do sufficiently load and charge them for it with Shame and Ignominy it were neither candid nor at this juncture seasonable to upbraid it to them or improve it to their dishonor and reproach For as they have tamely look'd on and connived till our Religion and Liberties are so far undermined and supplanted so it is they alone who are in a condition of stemming the Inundation of Idolatry and Tyranny with which we are threatned and of repairing our Breaches and reducing the Prerogative to its old Channel and making Popery sneak and retreat into its Holes and Corners again And should the Church of England he overthrown and devoured what an easie Prey would the Fanaticks be to the Romish Cormorants And could the King under the Conduct of the Iesuits and with the assistance of his Myrmidons dissolve the established Worship and Discipline they of the Separation would be in no capacity to support the Reformed Religion nor able to escape the common Ruine and Persecution 'T is therefore the interest as well as the duty of the Dissenters to help maintain and defend those Walls within the skreen and shelter whereof their own Hutts and Cottages are built and stand and the rather seeing the Conformists are at last tho to their own Religion's and the Nations expence become so far enlightned as to see a necessry of growing more amicable towards them and if not to enlarge the Terms of their Communion yet to grant an Indulgence to all Protestants that differ from them And as we ought to admire the Wisdom of God in those Providences by which Protestants are taught to lay aside their Animosities and to let fall their Persecutions of one another so it would be a contradiction both to the Principles and repeated Protestations of Dissenters to aim at more than such a Liberty as is consistent with a National Ecclesiastick Establishment Yet it were to proclaim themselves both Villains and Hypocrites not to allow their Fellow Protestants the exercise of their Judgments with what farther Profits and Emoluments the Law will grant them provided themselves may be discharged from all obnoxiousness to Penalties and Censures upon the account of their Consciences and be admitted a free and publick practice of their own respective Modes of Discipline and be suffered to Worship God in those ways which they think he hath required of and enjoyned them And were England immediately to be rendered so happy as to have a Protestant Prince ascend the Throne and to enjoy a Parliament duesy chosen and acting with freedom no one Party of the Reformed Religion among us must ever expect to be established and supported to the denyal of Liberty to others much less to be by Law empowered to ruin and destroy them Should it please Almighty God through denying Male Issue to the King to bring the Princess of Orange to the Crown tho the Church of England may in that case justly expect the being preserved and upheld as the National Establishment yet all other Protestants may very rationally promise themselves an Indulgence and that not only from the mildness and compassionate sweetness of her Temper but from the influence which the Prince her Husband will have upon her who as he is descended from Ancestors whose glory it was to be the Redeemers of their Country from Papal Persecution and Spanish Tyranny so his Education Generosity Wisdom and many Heroick Vâ—rtues dispose him to embrace all Protestants with an equal tenderness and to erect his Interest upon the being the Head and Patron of all that profess the Reformed Religion Had the late Duke of Monmouth been victorious against the Forces of the present King and inabled to have wrested the Scepter our of his hand tho all Protestants might thereupon have expected and would certainly have enjoyed an equal Freedom without the lyableness of any Party to Penal Laws for matters of Religion yet he would have been careful and I have reason to believe that it was his purpose to have had the Church of England preserved and maintained and that she should have suffered no alteration but what would have been to her strength and
Temper and imbued with all gracious inclinations to our Laws and the Rights of the Subject but for one Orthodox in his Religion and who would prove a Zealous Defender of the Doctrine Worship and Discipline of the Church as Established by Law are by this time both undeceived and filled with resentments for his having abused their credulity deceived their exspectations and reproached all their gloryings and boastings of him For as it would be now the greatest affront they could put upon the King to question his being of the Roman Communion or to detract from his Zeal for the introduction of Popery notwithstanding his own antecedent protestations as well as the many Statutes in force for the preservation of the Reformed Religion so I must take the liberty to tell them that his Apostacy is not of so late a Date as the World is made commonly to believe For though it was many years concealed and the contrary pretended and dissembled yet it is most certain that he Abjured the Protestant Religion soon after the Exilement of the Royal Family and was reconciled to the Romish Church at St. Germains in France Nor were several of the then suffering Bishops and Clergy ignorant of this though they had neither the Integrity nor Courage to give the Nation and Church warning of it And within these five years there was in the custody of a very worthy and honest Gentleman a Letter written to the late Bishop of Dâ—â—by a Dr. of Divinity then attending upon the Royal Brothers wherein the Apostacy of the then Duke of York to the Sea of Rome is particularly related and an account given how much the Duchess of Tremoville who without being her self observed had heard the Queen Mother glorying of it bewailed it as a dishonor to the Royal Family and as that which might prove of pernicious consequence to the Protestant Interest But tho the old Queen privately rejoiced and triumphed in it yet she knew too well what disadvantage it might be both to her Son and to the Papal Cause in Great Britain to have it at that season communicated and divulged Thereupon it remained a Secret for many years and by vertue of a Dispensation he sometimes joyned in all Ordinances with those of the Protestant Communion But for allthe art hypocrisie and sacrilege by which it was endeavoured to be concealed it might have been easily discerned as manifesting it self in the whole course of his Actions And at last his own zeal the importunity of the Priests and the cunning of the late King prevailing over Reasons of State he withdrew from all Acts of Fellowship with the Church of England But neither that nor his refusing the Test enjoyned by Law for distinguishing Papists from Protestants tho thereupon he was forced both to resign his Office of Lord High Admiral and to stand excluded from the House of Lords nor his declining the Oath which the Laws of Scotland for the securing a Protestant Governor enjoyn to be taken by the High Commissioner nor yet so many Parliaments having endeavoured to get him excluded from Succession to the Crown upon the account of having revolted to the Sea of Rome and thereby become dangerous to the established Religion could make impression upon a willfully deluded and obstinate sort of Protestants but in defiance of all means of Conviction they would persuade themselves that he was still a zealot for our Religion and a grand Patriot of the Church of England Nor could any thing undeceive them till upon his Brothers death he had openly declared himself a Roman Catholick and afterwards in the fumes and raptures of his victory over the late Duke of Monmouth had discovered and proclaimed his intentions of overthrowing both our Religion and our Laws Yea so closely had some sealed up their Eyes against all Beams of Light and hardened themselves against all evidences from Reason and Fact that had it pleased the Almighty God to have prospered the Duke of Monmouth's Arms in the Summer 85. the present King would have gone off the State with the reputation among them of a Prince tender of the Laws of the Kingdom and who notwithstanding his own being a Papist would have preserved the Reformed Religion and have maintained the Church of England in all her Grandeur and Rights And tho his whole life had been but one continued Conspiracy against our Civil Liberties and Privileges he had left the Throne with the Character and under the Esteem of a Gentleman that in the whole course of his Government would have regulated himself by the Rules of the Constitution and the Statutes of the Realm Now among all the Methods fallen upon by the Royal Brothers for the undermining and subverting our Religion and Laws there is none that they have pursued with more ardor and wherein they have been more succesful to the compassing of their designs than in their dividing Protestants and alienating their Affections and imbittering their Minds from and against one another And had not this lain under their prospect and the means of effecting it appeared easie they might have been Papists themselves while in the mean time they had been dispensed with to protest and swear their being of the Reformed Religion and they might have envied our Liberties and bewailed their Restriction from Arbitrary and Despotical Power but they never durst have entertained a thought of subverting the established Religion or of altering the Civil Government nor would they ever have had the boldness to have attempted the introducing and erecting Popery and Tyranny in their room And whosoever should have put them upon reducing the Nation to the Church of Rome or upon rendring the Monarchy unlimited and iudependent on the Law would have been thought to have laid a snare for exposing the Papists to greater severities than they were obnoxious unto before and to have projected the robbing the Crown of the Prerogatives which belong unto it by the Rules of the Constitution and to which it was so lately restored And the despair of succeeding would have rendred the Royal Brothers deaf to all importunities from Romish Emissaries and Court Minions Neither the promises and Oaths which they had made and taken beyond Sea to introduce Popery nor their ambition to advance themselves beyond the restraint of Laws and the Controll of Parliaments would have prevailed upon them to have encountred the hazards and difficulties which in case of the Union of English Protestants must have attended and ensued upon attempts and endeavours of the one kind and of the other Or should their beloved Popery and their own be biggottedness in the Romish Superstition have so far transported them beyond the bounds of wisdom and discretion as to have appeared possessed with an intention of Subverting the Protestant Religion and of enslaving the Nation to the Superstition and Idolatry of Rome they would have been made soon to understand That the Laws which make it Treason to own the jurisdiction of the Pope or to
seduce the meanest subject to the Church of Rome were not enacted in vain and that those as well as many more made for the security of the Protestant Religion and to prevent the growth and introduction of Popery were not to be dallied and plaid withal Or should they have been so far infatuated and abandoned of all understanding as out of a foolish and haughty affectation of being Absolute to have attempted the alteration of the Civil Government they would have been immediately and unanimously told that the people have the same Right to their Liberties that the King hath to the Prerogatives of the Crown And if they would not have been contented with what belongs unto the Prince by the Common and Statute Laws of the Realm but had invaded the Priviledges reserved unto the Subject they would have been made to know that they might not only be withstood in what they strove to Usurp contrary to Magna Charta Petition of Right and other Laws of the Kingdom but that thereby they forfeited and might be disseized of what either appertained unto the Crown by fundamental Agreements or hath been since settled upon the Monarch by Statute Laws Nor could any thing have emboldned his late Majesty and the present King to enterprises of the one kind or the other but the prospect of begetting a misunderstanding jealousie and rancour among Protestants and thereby both of making them instrumental to the ruin of one another and contributary to the loss of English Liberty and the Reformed Religion which they equally value and esteem and to the setting up Popery and Tyranny which the one detesteth and abhorreth no less than the other Though all English Protestants have ever been at an accord in all the Essentials and Vitals of Religion yet from the very beginning of the Reformation there have been differences among them concerning Ecclesiastical Government and Discipline and about Forms Rites and Ceremonies of Worship And had they consulted either their Duty to God or the common interest of Religion they might have found ways either for removing the occasions of them or they ought to have lived together as Brethren notwithstanding the differences which were among them in those things But how much wiser are the Children of this World than those of the Kingdom of God and of Jesus Christ. For though the differences amon the Papists do far exceed ours both in their number and in the importancy of those things wherein they disagree yet they do mutually tolerate and bear with one another The matters wherein they differ are neither made the Terms of their Church Communion nor the grounds of mutual Excommunications and Persecutions But alas one party among us hath been always endeavouring to cut or stretch others to their own size and have made those things which themselves stile indifferent both the Qualifications for admission to the Pastoral Office and the conditions of Fellowship in the Ordinances of the Gospel Nor is it to be expressed what advantages were hereby administred all along to the Common Enemy and what Sufferings Peaceable and Orthodox Christians were exposed unto from their peevish and angry Brethren And tho these things with the heats begotten among all and the Calamities undergone by one side were not the cause of that funestous War betwixt Charles the First and the Parliament yet they were an occasion of diverting thousands from the side which the persecuting Church Men espoused and of engaging them in the behalf of the two Houses in the Quarrel which they begun and carried on against that Prince for Defence of the Civil Liberties Privileges and Rights of the People But some of the Mitred Clergy were so far from being made wise by their own and the Nations Sufferings as upon their Restoration to hearken to moderate Counsels and to decline their former Rigors and Severities that they became the Tools and Instruments of the Court not only far reviving but for heightning and enflaming all the Differences which had formerly been among English Protestants For the Royal Brothers finding nothing more adapted and subservient than this to their design of altering the Government and subverting Religion they animated those waspish and impolitick Ecclesiasticks not only to pursue the Restoration of all those things which had given rise and occasion to former Dissentions and Persecutions but to lay new snares for alienating many persons of unspotted lives and tender consciences from the Church and of rendring them obnoxious to suffer in their Names Persons and Estates And what a satisfaction was it to the late King and his Brother to find the old Episcopal Clergy prepared through principles of revenge as well as from love of domination ambition and covetousness to fall in with the design not only of increasing Divisions among Protestants both by making the conditions of entring upon the Pastoral Function narrower and for screwing conformity with the Church in her Forms and Ceremonies of Worship into Tests for admission to Magistracy and Civil Trusts but of obtaining severer Laws against Dissenters whereby the penalties to which they foresaw that people would become liable were rendered greater than they had been before and their Sufferings made more merciless inhuman and barbarous For tho his late Majesty had by a Declaration dated at Breda promised Indulgence to all Protestants that would live peaceably under the Civil Government yet it was never in his thoughts to perform it and the previous obligations which he was under to the Church of Rome had a vertue to supercede and cancel his Engagements to English Hereticks And all he intended by that Declaration was only to wheedle and Iull those into a tameness of admitting his Return into his Dominions whom a jealousie of being afterwards persecuted for their Consciences might have awakened to withstand and dispute it And to give him his due he never judged himself longer bound to the observation of Promises and Oaths made to his People than until without hazard to his Person and Government he could violate and break them Accordingly he was no sooner seated in the Throne of his Ancestors and those whom he had been apprehensive of resistance and disturbance from put out of capacity and condition of attempting any thing against him but he thought himself discharged from every thing that the Royal Word and Faith of a Prince had been pledged and laid to stake for in that Declaration and from that day forward acted in direct opposition to all the parts and branches of it For having soon after his return obtained a Parliament moulded and adapted both to his Arbitrary and Papish Ends he immediately set all his Instruments at work for the procuring such Laws to be enacted as might divide and weaken Protestants and thereby make us not only the more easie a Prey to the Papists but afford them an advantage through our Scuffles of undermining our Religion with the less notice and observation How such persons came to be chosen and to constitute
other side in tho not only excepted from all obnoxiousness to those Laws but strenthened supported by them For as soon as the Court begun to despaire of prevailing upon the Fanaticks to become their Tools Instruments of enslaving the Nation and of exalting the Monarchy to despotical absoluteness they applyed to Some of the Church of England whom by gratifying with a vigorous execution of the Laws upon Dissenters they brought to abett applaud and justify them in all those counsels and ways which have reduced us into that miserable condition wherein we now are The Clergy being advanced to grandure and opulency things which many of them are fonder of and loather to forego than Religion and the Rights of the Nation the Court made it their business to possess them with a belief that unless the Fanaticks were suppressed and ruined they could not enjoy with security their dignities and wealth Whereupon not only the lesser Levites but the superior Clergy having their lesson and cue given them from Whitehall and St James fell upon pursuing the Nonconformists with Ecclesiastical punishments and upon exciting and animating the Civil Officers against them And under pretence of preserving and defending the Church they gave themselves over to an implicit serving of the Court and became not only Advocates but Instruments for the robbing of Corporations of their Charters for imposing Sheriffs upon the City of London who had not been legally elected and of fining and punishing men Arbitrarily for no crime save the having asserted their own and the Nations Rights in modest and lawful ways Posterity will hardly believe that so many of the prelatical Clergy and so great a number of members of the Church of England should from an enmity unto and pretended jealousie of the Panaticks have become Tools under the late King for justifying the Dissolution of so many Parliaments the invasion made upon their priviledges the ridiculing and stifling of the Popish plot the shamming of forged Conspiracies upon Protestants the condemning several to death for high Treason who could be rendred guilty by the Transgression of no known Law and finally for advancing a Gentleman to the Throne who had been engaged in a conjuration against Religion and the legal Government and whom three several Parliaments would have therefore excluded from the Right of Succession And being seduced into an espousal of the Interests of the Court against Religion Parliaments and the Nation it is doleful to consider what Doctrines both from pulpit and press were thereupon belched forth and divulged Such as Monarchy's being a Government by divine Right that it is in the Princes power to Rule as he pleaseth that it is a grace and condescention in the King to give an account of what he does that for Parliaments to direct or regulate the Succession borders upon Treason and is an offence against the Law of Nature and that the only thing left to subjects in case the King will Tyrannise over their Consciences Persons Estates is tamely to suffer and as they absurdly express it to exercise passive obedience So that by corrupting the minds consciences of men with those pestilent and slavish Notions they betrayed the Nation both to the mischiefs which have already overtaken us to what further we are yet threatned with Nor did these Doctrines tend meerly to the fettering enfeebling the Spirits of men but they were a temptation to the Royal Brothers to put in execution what they had been so long contriving and travelling with and were a kind of reprimanding them for being ignorant of their own Right and power and for not exerting it with that vigour and expedition which they might I do acknowledge that there were many both of the sacred order and of the laick Communion of the Church of England who were far from being infected with those brutish sentiments and opinions and who were as zealous as any for having the Monarchy kept within its ancient limits Parliaments maintained in their wonted Reverence and Authority the subjects preserved in the enjoyment of their immemorial priviledges and who were far from sacrificing our Religion and Laws to Popery Arbitrariness and from lulling us into a tameness and lethargy in case the Court should attempt the abolishing the established Doctrin and Worship and the subverting and changing the Civil Government But alas besides their being immediately branded with the name of conformable Fanaticks and registred in the Kalender with those that stood precluded the Kings favour merited his animadversion their modesty was soon drownd and silenced in the loud noise of their clamorous Brethren and their retiredness from conversation while the others frequented all places of society and publick concourse deprived the Nation of the benefit of their example and the happiness of their instructions Not have I mentioned the extravagancies of any of the Ecclesiasticks and members of the Church of England with a design either of reproaching and upbraiding them or of provoking and exasperating the Fanaticks to resentments but only to shew how fatal our divisions have been unto us what excesses they have occasioned our being hurried and transported into and what mischievous improvement our enemies have made of them to the supplanting and almost subverting of all that is valuable unto us as we are Englishmen Christians and Protestants And as our animosities through our Divisions gave the Court an advantage of suborning that party which they pretended to befriend and uphold into a ministration to all their Counsels and projections against our Religion and Laws so by reason of the unnatural heats wherewith Protestants have been enflamed and enraged against Protestants many weak ungrounded and unstable Souls have been tempted to question the truth of our Religion and to apostatise to the Church of Rome and thereupon have become united in inclination power and endeavours with the Court and our old Enemies the Papists for the exstirpation of protestancy and the alteration of the Government As it hath been matter of offence and scandal to all Men so it hath been ground of stumbling and falling unto many to see those who are professedly of the same Religion to be mutually embittered against one another and so far transported with malice and rage as to seek and pursue each others destruction For such a carriage and behaviour are so contrary to the spirit an principles of Christianity and to the genius and temper of true Religion that it is no mervaile if persons ignorant of the holy Scriptures and strangers to the converting and comforting vertue of the Doctrine of the Gospel asserted in our Confessions and insisted upon by our Divines should suspect the Orthodoxy of that Religion which is accompanied with so bitter fruits even in the Dispensers of the word as well as in others and betake themselves to the Communion of that Church where how many and important soever their differences be one with an other yet they do not break forth into those flames