urned in _different countries_, they
were merely required to avoid all participation in the idolatrous rites
of the heathen; but _as soon as they prospered into a kingdom_, and had
obtained _possession of Canaan_, they were strictly charged to suppress
idolatry, and to destroy all the monuments and incentives. The same duty
was _now_ incumbent on the professors of the true religion in Scotland.
Formerly, when not more than _ten persons in a county_ were enlightened,
it would have been _foolishness_ to have demanded of the nobility the
suppression of idolatry. But _now_, when knowledge had been increased,"
&c.[171] Such are the men who cry out for toleration during their state
of political weakness, but who cancel the bond by which they hold their
tenure whenever they "obtain possession of Canaan." The only commentary
on this piece of the secret history of _toleration_ is the acute remark
of Swift:--"We are fully convinced that we shall always tolerate them,
but not that they will tolerate us."

The truth is that TOLERATION was allowed by none of the parties! and I
will now show the dilemmas into which each party thrust itself.

When the kings of England would forcibly have established episcopacy in
Scotland, the presbyters passed an act _against the toleration of
dissenters from presbyterian doctrines and discipline_; and thus, as
Guthrie observes, they were committing the same violence on the
consciences of their brethren which they opposed in the king. The
presbyterians contrived their famous _covenant_ to dispossess the
royalists of their livings; and the independents, who assumed the
principle of toleration in their very name, shortly after enforced what
they called the _engagement_, to eject the presbyterians! In England,
where the dissenters were ejected, their great advocate Calamy complains
that the dissenters were only making use of the same arguments which the
most eminent reformers had done in their noble defence of the
reformation against the papists; while the arguments of the established
church against the dissenters were the same which were urged by the
papists against the protestant reformation![172] When the presbyterians
were our masters, and preached up the doctrine of passive obedience in
spiritual matters to the civil power, it was unquestionably passing a
self-condemnation on their own recent opposition and detraction of the
former episcopacy. Whenever men act from a secret motive entirely
contrar