Addresses were continually made,and the edge of the law continually whetted against them,from 1660to 1669,when the law for suppressing conventicles,and the last of those penal statutes passed,as I remember.Experience will justify me for saying that this long and extreme rigour was unwise,as well as unjust.It appears,indeed,from the memorials of those times,that they who suffered had given abundant provocation,though not sufficient excuse,to the rigour under which they suffered.Some former hardships which the Dissenters had endured from the Church,made them more violent against it,when they got possession of an usurped power.Just so the violence which they exercised at that time,stimulated the severity they felt in their turn,when the legal constitution of the Church was restored.Notwithstanding all which,I incline,upon very good reasons,to think that this severity was not in the first design of the ministers,nor would have been shown,if another fatal influence had not prevailed.The influence I mean is that of popery.
It prevailed from the first moments to the last of the reign of King Charles the Second.The best ministers were frequently driven off their bias by it.
The worst had a sure hold on their master,by complying with it.On the occasion now mentioned,this influence and the artifice of the popish faction worked very fatally on the passions of parties,and the private interests of individuals;and the ministers,and the Church,and the Dissenters,were bubbles alike of their common enemy.Bare faced popery could ask no favour,because popery could expect none.Protestant Dissenters were therefore to serve as stalking horses,that papists might creep behind them,and have hopes of being some time or other,admitted with them.The Church party was hallooed on the Dissenters;whilst the Dissenters were encouraged to unite and hold out;whilst they were flattered with an high opinion of their own strength,and the King's favour;and whilst some leading men amongst them,who thought it better to be at the head of a sect than at the tail of an establishment,were perhaps encouraged and confirmed in that thought,by the private applications of the court.
These arts,these wicked arts (for such they were)prevailed;and though the two thousand ministers,who went out of their churches on one day,were far from being all of the same mind,or having one positive consistent scheme;though many of them must have lost their benefices,even if they had complied with the Act of Uniformity,because they were intruders,and in actual possession of benefices legally belonging to others;yet,by uniting in the point of non-conformity,they appeared as one body,and in some sense they were so.
Several of them were popular for certain modes of devotion,suited to the humour of the time;and several were men eminent for true learning and unaffected piety.They increased the zeal of their flocks,and created compassion in others.Here the court began to reap the fruits of their management,in the struggle for a toleration.I use the word,though I know it may be simply cavilled at.The first step made was an application to the King,who declared himself ready and willing to dispense,in their favour,with several things in the Act of Uniformity..and thus the Dissenters were made,by the severity of the Parliament and the intrigues of the court,the instruments of introducing a dispensing power.Such attempts were made more than once;but happily failed as often as made,through the vigorous opposition of Parliament;till at last the scene began to open more,and the Dissenters to see that they were made the tools of promoting what they never intended,the advancement of the prerogative above law,and the toleration of popery against it.
To conclude.By such means as I have described,the constitution of parties after the Restoration preserved unhappily too near a resemblance to the constitution of parties before the war.The prerogative was not,indeed,carried so high in some instances,as James and Charles the First had attempted to carry it.Nay,some supports of it were bought off,and taken away;and others more dangerous,as we have observed,were prevented by the virtue of the men at that time in power.But still the government was established on principles sufficient to invite a king to exercise arbitrary power,and support him by their consequences in the exercise of it afterwards;so that,in this respect,the seeds of future divisions were sowed abundantly.The Dissenters had,indeed,lost much of their credit and all their power.But still they had numbers,and property,and industry,and compassion,for them;so that here was another crop of dissensions planted to nurse up,and to strengthen the other.They did not inflame the contest which followed,into a civil war,as they had helped to do formerly;but I think that without them,and the disunion and hatred among Protestants,consequent upon them,the zeal against popery could not have run into a kind of factious fury,as we shall be obliged to confess it did.I think that fears of falling once more under Presbyterian,or republican power,could not have been wrought up in the manner they were,towards the end of this reign,so as to drown even the fear of popery itself;so as to form a party,in favour of a popish successor;so as to transport both clergy and laity into an avowal of principles,which must have reduced us to be at this time slaves,not freemen,papists,not Protestants;if the very men,who had avowed such principles,had not saved themselves and us,in direct opposition to them.But I am running into the subject of another letter,when this is grown too prolix already.
I am,sir,yours,etc.
