em, all the well-placed sympathies of the human breast.

This famous sermon of the Old Jewry breathes nothing but this spirit
through all the political part. Plots, massacres, assassinations, seem
to some people a trivial price for obtaining a revolution. A cheap,
bloodless reformation, a guiltless liberty, appear flat and vapid to
their taste. There must be a great change of scene; there must be a
magnificent stage effect; there must be a grand spectacle to rouse the
imagination, grown torpid with the lazy enjoyment of sixty years'
security, and the still unanimating repose of public prosperity. The
preacher found them all in the French Revolution. This inspires a
juvenile warmth through his whole frame. His enthusiasm kindles as he
advances; and when he arrives at his peroration, it is in a full blaze.
Then viewing, from the Pisgah of his pulpit, the free, moral, happy,
flourishing, and glorious state of France, as in a bird-eye landscape of
a promised land, he breaks out into the following rapture:--

"What an eventful period is this! I am _thankful_ that I have lived to
it; I could almost say, _Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in
peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation_.--I have lived to see a
_diffusion_ of knowledge which has undermined superstition and error.--I
have lived to see _the rights of men_ better understood than ever, and
nations panting for liberty which seemed to have lost the idea of it.--I
have lived to see _thirty millions of people_, indignant and resolute,
spurning at slavery, and demanding liberty with an irresistible voice;
_their king led in triumph, and an arbitrary monarch surrendering
himself to his subjects_."[88]

Before I proceed further, I have to remark that Dr. Price seems rather
to overvalue the great acquisitions of light which he has obtained and
diffused in this age. The last century appears to me to have been quite
as much enlightened. It had, though in a different place, a triumph as
memorable as that of Dr. Price; and some of the great preachers of that
period partook of it as eagerly as he has done in the triumph of France.
On the trial of the Reverend Hugh Peters for high treason, it was
deposed, that, when King Charles was brought to London for his trial,
the Apostle of Liberty in that day conducted the _triumph_. "I saw,"
says the witness, "his Majesty in the coach with six horses, and Peters
riding before the king _triumphing_." Dr. Price, when he talks as i