winked people.
But a protestant will not sympathise with the feelings of the Jesuit;
yet the protestants, too, will discover particular providences, and
magnify human events into supernatural ones. This custom has long
prevailed among fanatics: we have had books published by individuals, of
"particular providences," which, as they imagined, had fallen to their
lot. They are called "passages of providence;" and one I recollect by a
crack-brained puritan, whose experience never went beyond his own
neighbourhood, but who having a very bad temper, and many whom he
considered his enemies, wrote down all the misfortunes which happened to
them as acts of "particular providences," and valued his blessedness on
the efficacy of his curses!

Without venturing to penetrate into the mysteries of the present order
of human affairs, and the great scheme of fatality or of accident, it
may he sufficiently evident to us, that often on a single event revolve
the fortunes of men and of nations.

An eminent writer has speculated on the defeat of Charles the Second at
Worcester, as "one of those events which most strikingly exemplify how
much better events are disposed of by Providence, than they would be if
the direction were left to the choice even of the best and the wisest
men." He proceeds to show, that a royal victory must have been succeeded
by other severe struggles, and by different parties. A civil war would
have contained within itself another civil war. One of the blessings of
his defeat at Worcester was, that it left the commonwealth's men masters
of the three kingdoms, and afforded them "full leisure to complete and
perfect their own structure of government. The experiment was fairly
tried; there was nothing from without to disturb the process; it went on
duly from change to change." The close of this history is well known.
Had the royalists obtained the victory at Worcester, the commonwealth
party might have obstinately persisted, that had their republic not been
overthrown, "their free and liberal government" would have diffused its
universal happiness through the three kingdoms. This idea is ingenious;
and might have been pursued in my proposed "History of Events which have
not happened," under the title of "The Battle of Worcester won by
Charles the Second." The chapter, however, would have had a brighter
close, if the sovereign and the royalists had proved themselves better
men than the knaves and fanatics of the commonwe