ish Liberties should have been
laid by "Superstition." These Puritans came forward with Calvinistic
incredible Creeds, Anti-Laudisms, Westminster Confessions; demanding,
chiefly of all, that they should have liberty to _worship_ in their own
way. Liberty to _tax_ themselves: that was the thing they should have
demanded! It was Superstition, Fanaticism, disgraceful ignorance of
Constitutional Philosophy to insist on the other thing!--Liberty to
_tax_ oneself? Not to pay out money from your pocket except on reason
shown? No century, I think, but a rather barren one would have fixed on
that as the first right of man! I should say, on the contrary, A just
man will generally have better cause than _money_ in what shape soever,
before deciding to revolt against his Government. Ours is a most
confused world; in which a good man will be thankful to see any kind of
Government maintain itself in a not insupportable manner: and here in
England, to this hour, if he is not ready to pay a great many taxes
which he can see very small reason in, it will not go well with him, I
think! He must try some other climate than this. Tax-gatherer? Money?
He will say: "Take my money, since you _can_, and it is so desirable to
you; take it,--and take yourself away with it; and leave me alone to my
work here. I am still here; can still work, after all the money you have
taken from me!" But if they come to him, and say, "Acknowledge a Lie;
pretend to say you are worshipping God, when you are not doing it:
believe not the thing that you find true, but the thing that I find, or
pretend to find true!" He will answer: "No; by God's help, no! You may
take my purse; but I cannot have my moral Self annihilated. The purse is
any Highwayman's who might meet me with a loaded pistol: but the Self is
mine and God my Maker's; it is not yours; and I will resist you to the
death, and revolt against you, and, on the whole, front all manner of
extremities, accusations and confusions, in defence of that!"--

Really, it seems to me the one reason which could justify revolting,
this of the Puritans. It has been the soul of all just revolts among
men. Not _Hunger_ alone produced even the French Revolution; no, but
the feeling of the insupportable all-pervading _Falsehood_ which had now
embodied itself in Hunger, in universal material Scarcity and Nonentity,
and thereby become _indisputably_ false in the eyes of all! We will
leave the Eighteenth century with its "liberty