accuses "the
jealousy of our clergy, who had degraded themselves into intriguers; and
like mechanics in a trade, who are afraid of nothing so much as
interlopers--they had therefore induced indifferent persons to imagine
that their earnest contest was not about their faith, but about their
temporal possessions. It was incongruous that a church, which does not
pretend to be infallible, should constrain persons, under heavy
penalties and punishments, to believe as she does: they delighted, he
asserted, to hold an iron rod over dissenters and catholics; so sweet
was dominion, that the very thought of others participating in their
freedom made them deny the very doctrine they preached." The chief
argument the catholic urged on this occasion was "the reasonableness of
repealing laws which made men liable to the greatest punishments for
that it was not in their power to remedy, for that no man could force
himself to believe what he really did not believe."[165]

Such was the rational language of the most bigoted of zealots!--The fox
can bleat like the lamb. At the very moment James the Second was
uttering this mild expostulation, in his own heart he had anathematised
the nation; for I have seen some of the king's private papers, which
still exist; they consist of communications, chiefly by the most bigoted
priests, with the wildest projects, and most infatuated prophecies and
dreams, of restoring the true catholic faith in England! Had the
Jesuit-led monarch retained the English throne, the language he now
addressed to the nation would have been no longer used; and in that case
it would have served his protestant subjects. He asked for toleration,
to become intolerant! He devoted himself, not to the hundredth part of
the English nation; and yet he was surprised that he was left one
morning without an army! When the catholic monarch issued this
declaration for "liberty of conscience," the Jekyll of his day observed,
that "it was but scaffolding: they intend to build another house, and
when that house (Popery) is built, they will take down the
scaffold."[166]

When presbytery was our lord, they who had endured the tortures of
persecution, and raised such sharp outcries for freedom, of all men were
the most intolerant: hardly had they tasted of the Circean cup of
dominion, ere they were transformed into the most hideous or the most
grotesque monsters of political power. To their eyes toleration was an
hydra, and the dethroned