ased.
During the Revolutionary war the case was just the reverse--the parties
mutually changed places. The Tories were the national and patriotic, the
Whigs the grumbling and discontented party. Both parties, in both periods,
were in reality actuated, perhaps unconsciously, by their party
interests--the Whigs were patriotic and national, the Tories backward and
lukewarm when the Whigs were in power, and derived lustre from foreign
success; the Tories were patriotic and national when they held the reins
of government, and the opposite vices had passed over to their
antagonists.

But if from the external policy and foreign triumphs of the Whigs during
the first sixty years of the eighteenth century, we turn to the domestic
government which they established, and the social ameliorations which they
introduced, we shall see much less reason to congratulate ourselves on the
benefits gained by the Revolution. It is here that the great moral and
political lesson of the eighteenth century is to be found; this it is
which it behoves our historians to tell; this it is which they have left
untold. The long possession of power, after the accession of William and
Mary, by the Whig party, which continued uninterrupted for seventy years,
and the want of any philosophical history of the period since they were
dispossessed of office, have prevented the truth from being boldly told,
or even generally known in this country. It is much more generally
appreciated, however, by continental writers, and we may rest assured the
eyes of future generations will be steadily fixed on it. The danger is,
that it will throw discredit on the cause, both of civil and religious
freedom, in the eyes of future generations in the world. Let us, in the
first instance, boldly, and without seeking to disguise the truth, examine
what are the religious and civil evils which have attracted the attention
of mankind in Great Britain during the eighteenth century, and then
enquire whether they are the necessary result of the Reformation and the
Revolution, or have arisen from causes foreign to that of religious and
civil freedom--in a word, from the usual intermixture of human selfishness
and iniquity with those great convulsions.

The two great evils which have disfigured the reformed church in the
British islands, since its final establishment at the Revolution, have
been the endless multiplication and unceasing rancour of sects, and the
palpable outgrowth of the