e follow some rambling remarks on the need for a
revisal of the Liturgy and the Articles, a complaint of the servility
shown in a recent address to King George, who ought to consider himself
rather the servant than the sovereign of his people, and a prediction
that France and England, each delivered from despotism by a happy
revolution, will now "not merely refrain from engaging in wars with one
another, but unite in preventing wars everywhere." As for our own
Revolution of 1688, it was a great but not a perfect work. It had left
religious toleration incomplete and the Parliamentary franchise unequal.
We must continue to enforce its principles, especially in the matter of
removing the disabilities that still weigh upon dissenters. Those
principles are briefly (1) Liberty of Conscience, (2) The right to
resist power when it is abused, and (3) The right to choose our own
governors, to cashier them for misconduct and to frame a government for
ourselves. There follows a curious little moral exhortation which shows
how far the good Dr. Price was from forgetting his duties as a preacher.
He had been distressed by the lax morals of some of his colleagues in
the agitation for Reform, and he pauses to deplore that "not all who are
zealous in this cause are as conspicuous for purity of morals as for
ability." He cannot reconcile himself to the idea of an immoral patriot,
and begs that they will at least hide their vices. The old man finds
his peroration in Simeon's prayer. He had seen the great salvation. "I
have lived to see thirty millions of people indignant and resolute,
spurning at slavery and demanding liberty with an irresistible voice,
their king led in triumph and an arbitrary monarch surrendering himself
to his subjects. And now methinks I see the ardour for liberty catching
and spreading, a general amendment beginning in human affairs; the
dominion of kings changed for the dominion of laws, and the dominion of
priests giving way to the dominion of reason and conscience."

The world remembers the scholar Salmasius only because he provoked
Milton to a learned outbreak of bad manners. There is something immortal
even in the ill-temper of great men, and Dr. Price lives in modern
memory chiefly because he moved Burke to declamatory rage. His
_Reflections on the French Revolution_ was an answer to the Old Jewry
sermon, which, eloquent itself, was to beget much eloquence in others.
For four years the mighty debate went on, and