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the men, or the women, that acted? Whereupon, Charles, in spite of his brother James's remonstrances to the contrary, sent some of his own guards to waylay Coventry, and set the king's mark upon

him.

Sands, Obrian, and others, drew their swords on him, as he was entering his lodgings; Coventry seized a flambeau with one hand, and with his sword in the other, defended himself valiantly against his numerous assailants. After wounding some of the guardsmen, he was disarmed by the rest, who slit his nose open to the bone; to teach him, they said, to respect the king. In this state they left him, and went back to the duke of Monmouth's, where Obrian's arm was dressed.

Such was the condition of civil liberty in England, under this precious limb of the Stuart body; nor was religious liberty in a better state, under the auspices of this supreme secular head of the established church. During the great fire, which had consumed so large a portion of the city of London, as during the devastations of the plague, the regular national clergy had deserted their flocks; and the nonconformists administered spiritual consolation to the suffering and bereaved people. Wherefore, in 1669, when the city was rebuilt, an act was proposed, reviving the former act against conventicles, with some additional severities; namely, that in any case of doubt, concerning the meaning of any part of the law, it should be determined in the sense most hostile to conventicles; and that every justice should be heavily fined, if he did not execute the law, upon information given.

Upon this, many justices resigned their commissions, rather than be the instruments of such eccle

siastical tyranny. No jury trial was allowed; but the nonconformists were exposed to conviction on the oath of a single informer, who received one-third of the exorbitant fine. This infernal act was so rigorously executed in Starling's mayoralty, that all

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London was in disorder, and many merchants prepared to remove to Holland, with their industry and trading capital. But still the informers were encouraged, and every where labouring in their regular vocation. Among other dissenters, the quakers, or friends, suffered very severely, and with great firmness and resolution, during this protestant episcopal established church persecution.

The present limits do not allow of tracing the foottracks of persecution, marked by the course of the Anglican Church, any farther. Her labours, in that part of her calling, during the remainder of the reign of Charles the second, and the reigns of James, of William, of Ann, and of the Brunswick sovereigns, must be reserved for future notice.

It is, however, necessary to observe, that the church of England has not yet learned the wisdom, which flows from the mild and tolerant spirit of Christianity, notwithstanding the experience of the iniquity and the evil of persecution, for nearly three centuries. A very few years since, lord Sidmouth brought a bill into the house of peers, the effect of which, had it passed into a law, would have been to renew the blessings of the Bartholomew, the conventicle, and the five mile acts. But the English dissenters, of all denominations, uniting together, poured in such a flood of petitions against the bill, as compelled the British government to desist from their proposed crusade against evangelism.

The reverend doctor Coke, an eminent clergyman in the Wesleyan connexion, called upon lord Sidmouth, while this bill was in agitation, and told him, that if it became a law, its first operation would be to send four thousand methodist local preachers to gaol. For these men could not conscientiously desist from preaching the Gospel, merely because his lordship and the established church wished to silence them; as two thousand evangelical ministers had been silenced in the year 1662. But, notwithstanding this plain and intelligible declaration, the saga

cious statesman persisted in bringing his project of persecution before the house of lords.

In the year 1811, was made this notable effort to break up the toleration act, and destroy religious liberty in England; by imposing new and intolerable restrictions upon the dissenters. The noble viscount's eloquence was employed in describing the nonconforming preachers, as," blacksmiths, cobblers, tailors, pedlers, chimneysweepers, and what not." This eloquence was backed by the pious efforts of the formal, high church bishops, who were, however, frightened by, what the primate of Canterbury called the flood of petitions, which deluged the table of the house of lords." The lay peers of England did their duty on that day; and by their speeches and votes, in favour of universal religious freedom, not only defeated the noble doctor's attempt to poison piety in the phial of persecution; but, actually, obtained an enlargement of the privileges of protestant dissenters.

"

The immediate operation of lord Sidmouth's bill, if enacted into a law, would have been to crowd the gaols of England with four thousand methodist preachers, and a still greater number of independent, or congregational, clergy; for the crime of preaching the pure Gospel. Leaving at large Socinians, formalists, deists, and atheists, to edify a Christian community. But the event of this flagitious effort proved, that the ecclesiastical tyranny of the seventeenth, cannot be revived in the nineteenth century.

England seems never to have been able to divest herself of the notion of the necessity of a national, or state church, which must absorb all religion in its own established gulf; and to whose dominion all must bend. During the reign of the Tudors, particularly of Elizabeth, the English government made a wide difference in its treatment of those, who were attached to a particular form of church order, at home, or abroad. Thus, in England, nonepisco

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palians were fined, imprisoned, pilloried, banished, butchered, at the same time that aid was afforded to the Huguenots in France, and to the Dutch insurgents against Spain.

In justice to the Stuarts, it must be acknowledged that not one of them ever aided a foreign protestant; they were all too much occupied in persecuting English and Scottish protestants at home. And when the presbyterians gained the ascendancy, during the latter part of the reign of Charles, and during the protectorate of Cromwell, they endeavoured to force all England into a presbyterian state church; while they were disposed to be kindly towards the congregationalists of New-England. At all times, however, under a national church, whether episcopalian, or presbyterian, or independent, the established clergy, when they fail to convince others by the force of their oral or written arguments, are very desirous of calling in to their aid, those two great doctors in theology, those resident graduates of the scourge and of the gallows; the beadle and the hangman.

If a national church establishment be necessary to promote piety, and prevent heathenism in a country; how is it, that during the full influence of the English church establishment, from its restoration, under Charles the second, to the middle of the reign of George the second, infidelity was so much diffused in England; and that its progress was never effectually checked, until after the revivals of religion by Whitfield and Wesley, and their followers; which revivals, the Anglican national church establishment have always laboured, and do now labour, to the extreme extent of their power, to oppose and to destroy?

Mr. Southey himself, a very strenuous and a very able advocate for the established church of England, admits, in his life of John Wesley, that the constitution of that clerical establishment has a natural tendency to produce irreligious, formal minis

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ters; who are precisely the sort of clergy best calculated to promote infidelity among the laity, by divesting Christianity of all its spiritual attractions and principles. The Anglican Church offers an easy, respectable provision for the younger sons of the nobility and gentry, who take up the clerical, as they would any secular calling; and being settled upon family livings, inflict deep and deadly wounds upon the character of the establishment; and offer grievous violence to the religious feelings of the nation.

Their inability, or disinclination for the sacred of fice, into which they are thrust for a morsel of bread, is a fearful thing for themselves, and a horrible calamity for the people committed to their unfaithful charge. Nay, even when the motives for entering the established church are not thus palpably gross, the choice is far more frequently made, from motives of convenience and worldly circumstances, than from a deliberate and conscientious determination of the will and judgment.

Influence in an endowed school, or a prospect of promotion at college, destines boys for holy orders; with little reference to their talents and disposition; nay, sometimes, because they are thought too dull and incompetent for any other vocation. And when no unfitness exists, the destination is usually regarded with ominous indifference; as if it might be entered upon with as little forethought and feeling, as any secular profession or branch of trade; as if all the heart, and all the soul, and all the strength of man, were not required for the due performance of its duties; and a minister of the Gospel were responsible for nothing more than what the rubric enjoins.

In addition to the deadly formalism of the English state clergy, a speculative infidelity was imported from France, where it originated in a corrupt established, or national, church, and a most infamously licentious literature. In this school some of the leading statesmen of Charles the second, together with their royal master, had been trained. Of course