ents, Governors of
fortresses. The share which in a few months they had obtained of the
temporal patronage of the crown was much more than ten times as great
as they would have had under an impartial system. Yet this was not
the worst. They were made rulers of the Church of England. Men who had
assured the King that they held his faith sate in the High Commission,
and exercised supreme jurisdiction in spiritual things over all the
prelates and priests of the established religion. Ecclesiastical
benefices of great dignity had been bestowed, some on avowed Papists,
and some on half concealed Papists. And all this had been done while the
laws against Popery were still unrepealed, and while James had still a
strong interest in affecting respect for the rights of conscience. What
then was his conduct likely to be, if his subjects consented to free
him, by a legislative act, from even the shadow of restraint? Is it
possible to doubt that Protestants would have been as effectually
excluded from employment, by a strictly legal use of the royal
prerogative, as ever Roman Catholics had been by Act of Parliament?

How obstinately James was determined to bestow on the members of his
own Church a share of patronage altogether out of proportion to their
numbers and importance is proved by the instructions which, in exile
and old age, he drew up for the guidance of his son. It is impossible
to read without mingled pity and derision those effusions of a mind on
which all the discipline of experience and adversity had been exhausted
in vain. The Pretender is advised if ever he should reign in England, to
make a partition of offices, and carefully to reserve for the members of
the Church of Rome a portion which might have sufficed for them if
they had been one half instead of one fiftieth part of the nation. One
Secretary of State, one Commissioner of the Treasury, the Secretary
at War, the majority of the great dignitaries of the household, the
majority of the officers of the army, are always to be Catholics. Such
were the designs of James after his perverse bigotry had drawn on him
a punishment which had appalled the whole world. Is it then possible
to doubt what his conduct would have been if his people, deluded by the
empty name of religious liberty, had suffered him to proceed without any
check?

Even Penn, intemperate and undiscerning as was his zeal for the
Declaration, seems to have felt that the partiality with which honours
a