ps the only English Nonconformist preacher who
has ever enjoyed a European reputation. No less a man than Condorcet
refers to him as one of the formative minds of the century.

Dr. Price's sermon is worth a glance, not merely because it was the goad
which provoked Burke to eloquent fury, but still more because it is a
document which records for us the mood in which even the older and
graver progressives of his generation greeted the French Revolution. It
was an official discourse delivered before the Society for Commemorating
the Revolution in Great Britain. This typically English club claimed to
have met annually since 1688 for a dinner and a sermon. The centenary of
our own Revolution and the events in France gave it for a moment a
central place on the political stage. It was an eminently respectable
society, mainly composed of middle-class Nonconformists, with four
Doctors of Divinity on its Committee, an entrance fee of half-a-guinea,
and a radical peer, Earl Stanhope, for its Chairman. At its annual
meeting in November, 1789, Dr. Price "disdaining national partialities
and rejoicing in every triumph of liberty and justice over arbitrary
power," had moved an address congratulating the French National Assembly
on "the Revolution in that country and on the prospect it gives to the
two first kingdoms in the world of a common participation in the
blessings of civil and religious liberty." The sermon was an eloquent
expansion of this address.

It opens with a defence of the cosmopolitan attitude which could rejoice
at an improvement in the prospects of our hereditary rival. Christ
taught not patriotism, but universal benevolence, as the parable of the
Good Samaritan shows. "My neighbour" is he to whom I can do most good,
whether foreigner or fellow-citizen. We should love our country
"ardently but not exclusively," considering ourselves "citizens of the
world," and taking care "to maintain a just regard to the rights of
other countries." Patriotism had been in history a scourge of mankind.
It was among the Romans no better than "a principle holding together a
band of robbers in their attempts to crush all liberty but their own."
The aim of those who love their kind can be only to spread Truth, Virtue
and Liberty. To make mankind happy and free, it should suffice to
instruct them. "Ignorance is the parent of bigotry, intolerance,
persecution and slavery. Inform and instruct mankind and these evils
will be excluded." Ther