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, though 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liberties of a country, whose laws can be neither enacted nor repealed,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 shall 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 an answer once for
all, to the tedious scurrilities of those idle people, who affirm, I am
hired and directed what to write;[6] I must here inform them, that their
censure is an effect of their principles: The present m[inistr]y are
under no necessity of employing prostitute pens; they have no dark
designs to promote, by advancing heterodox opinions.

But (to return) suppose two or three private divines, under King Charles
the Second, did a little overstrain the doctrine of passive obedience to
princes; some allowance might be given to the memory of that unnatural
rebellion against his father, and the dismal consequences of resistance.
It is plain, by the proceedings of the Churchmen before and at the
Revolution, that this doctrine was never designed to introduce arbitrary
power.[7]

I look upon the Whigs and Dissenters to be exactly of the same political
faith; let us, therefore, see what share each of them had in advancing
arbitrary power. It is manifest, that