s faith with Amurath the Turk,
at the instigation of Julian the Pope's legate, and his miserable
death ensuing it, shews that even to infidels, much more to
Christians, that obligation ought to be accounted sacred[33]. And I
the rather urge this, because it is an argument taken almost
_verbatim_ from a papist, who accuses Catharine de Medicis for
violating her word given to the protestants during her regency of
France. What securities in particular we have, that our own religion
and liberties would be preserved though under a popish successor, any
one may inform himself at large in a book lately written by the
reverend and learned doctor Hicks, called Jovian, in answer to Julian
the Apostate[34]; in which that truly Christian author has satisfied
all scruples which reasonable men can make, and proved that we are in
no danger of losing either; and wherein also, if those assurances
should all fail, (which is almost morally impossible,) the doctrine of
passive obedience is unanswerably demonstrated; a doctrine delivered
with so much sincerity, and resignation of spirit, that it seems
evident the assertor of it is ready, if there were occasion, to seal
it with his blood.

I have done with mannerly Mr Hunt, who is only _magni nominis umbra_;
the most malicious, and withal, the most incoherent ignorant scribbler
of the whole party. I insult not over his misfortunes, though he has
himself occasioned them; and though I will not take his own excuse,
that he is in passion, I will make a better for him, for I conclude
him cracked; and if he should return to England, am charitable enough
to wish his only prison might be Bedlam. This apology is truer than
that he makes for me; for writing a play, as I conceive, is not
entering into the Observator's province; neither is it the
Observator's manner to confound truth with falsehood, to put out the
eyes of people, and leave them without understanding. The quarrel of
the party to him is, that he has undeceived the ignorant, and laid
open the shameful contrivances of the new vamped Association; that
though he is "on the wrong side of life," as he calls it, yet he
pleads not his age to be _emeritus_; that, in short, he has left the
faction as bare of arguments, as AEsop's bird of feathers; and plumed
them of all those fallacies and evasions which they borrowed from
jesuits and presbyterians.

Now for my templar and poet in association for a libel, like the
conjunction of Saturn and Jupit