s, but
united to him by Christian charity and by common zeal for the essentials
of the reformed faith. There had never before been such a day in
England; and there has never since been such a day. The tide of feeling
was already on the turn; and the ebb was even more rapid than the
flow had been. In a very few hours the High Churchman began to feel
tenderness for the enemy whose tyranny was now no longer feared, and
dislike of the allies whose services were now no longer needed. It
was easy to gratify both feelings by imputing to the dissenters the
misgovernment of the exiled King. His Majesty-such was now the language
of too many Anglican divines-would have been an excellent sovereign
had he not been too confiding, too forgiving. He had put his trust in
a class of men who hated his office, his family, his person, with
implacable hatred. He had ruined himself in the vain attempt to
conciliate them. He had relieved them, in defiance of law and of the
unanimous sense of the old royalist party, from the pressure of the
penal code; had allowed them to worship God publicly after their own
mean and tasteless fashion; had admitted them to the bench of justice
and to the Privy Council; had gratified them with fur robes, gold
chains, salaries, and pensions. In return for his liberality, these
people, once so uncouth in demeanour, once so savage in opposition even
to legitimate authority, had become the most abject of flatterers. They
had continued to applaud and encourage him when the most devoted friends
of his family had retired in shame and sorrow from his palace. Who had
more foully sold the religion and liberty of his country than Titus? Who
had been more zealous for the dispensing power than Alsop? Who had urged
on the persecution of the seven Bishops more fiercely than Lobb? What
chaplain impatient for a deanery had ever, even when preaching in the
royal presence on the thirtieth of January or the twenty-ninth of
May, uttered adulation more gross than might easily be found in
those addresses by which dissenting congregations had testified their
gratitude for the illegal Declaration of Indulgence? Was it strange that
a prince who had never studied law books should have believed that
he was only exercising his rightful prerogative, when he was thus
encouraged by a faction which had always ostentatiously professed hatred
of arbitrary power? Misled by such guidance, he had gone further and
further in the wrong path: he had at