Again, in reference to Tillotson’s comprehension scheme, this firebrand orator exclaims: “And yet this Church must open her injured arms to receive this sly and insidious viper into her bosom. Her sacred enclosures must be laid open, that this boar out of the wood might waste it. Her partition wall must be broken down, and the veil of her temple rent in twain, to make way for that adversary to enter, whom no reason ever yet could convince; no kindness ever yet could win; no condescension ever yet could oblige; and whom nothing but the corruption of our doctrine, the destruction of our discipline, and the sequestration of our estates and revenues, can satisfy,” (p. 21.)

“The Dissenting party have more than once been joined with the Papists, in their arms and counsels, as well to extirpate our government as to subvert our Church. They were at first the bastard spawn of Papists, and have ever since been the instruments of their malice, the propagators of their schism, and the panders of that cursed train of mischief, that was originally hatched in a conclave, and afterwards brought forth and nursed up in a conventicle. They are not to be looked upon as a religious sect, but as a political faction in our State, uneasy under its laws, affronting its authority, denying its legal power, endeavouring to supplant its jurisdiction, and to wrest the reins of dominion out of our rulers’ hands,” (p. 22.)

The fiery preacher thus concludes:—“It is an amazing contradiction to our reason, and the greatest scandal upon our Church, that any, pretending to be her true sons, pillars, and defenders, should turn such apostates and renegadoes to their oaths and professions, such false traitors to their trusts and offices as to strike sail with a party that is such an open and avowed enemy to our communion, and against whom every man that wishes its welfare ought to hang out the bloody flag and banner of defiance. Is this the people for whom, at the expense of hazarding our eternal safety, we must give up our ancient faith, constitution, and form of worship? If the Church of England can have no other way of showing her charity than by prostituting her purity, and debauching her religion, I hope they will pardon her if she imitate her blessed Author and Founder, under a temptation not unlike it, who, with scorn and disdain, turned His back upon the devil when he asked Him to fall down and worship him. We must watch against these crafty, faithless, and insidious persons, who can creep to our altars, and partake of our sacraments, that they may be qualified more secretly and powerfully to undermine us. This is such a religious piece of political hypocrisy as even no heathen government would have endured; and, blessed be God, there is now a person on the throne, who so justly weighs the interest of Church and State as to remove so false an engine that visibly overturns both,” (p. 24.)

Such was the way in which the High Church party began their campaign, and four months afterwards their representatives, in the House of Commons, brought in and passed their pet “Occasional Conformity Bill.”

The Dissenters, at this period, were an influential and important community. They were, generally speaking, men of trade and industry, and the moneyed interests of England were, to a great extent, in their hands. Such was their consequence in the State, that, the parliamentary discussions of the “Occasional Conformity Bill” seriously influenced the money market, and the prices of stocks rose or fell just as the bill was likely to be passed or to be rejected.[[169]] And yet, notwithstanding their number and importance, they were, with a few exceptions, extremely reasonable in their demands. Defoe, himself a Dissenter,[[170]] expounds them in a pamphlet published at the time, and we presume that his exposition may be considered tolerably correct and just. He suggests that if Dissenters are to be excluded from all places of profit, trust, and honour, they ought to be excused from all places attended with charge, trouble, and loss of time; that if a Dissenter be pressed as a sailor to fight at sea, or be enlisted as a soldier to fight on shore, he ought not to be declared incapable of preferment; and that if Dissenters must not only maintain their own clergy and their own poor, but also join in maintaining the clergy and the poor of the Established Church,—if they must pay the same taxes and the same duties that Churchmen pay, it is somewhat hard that they are to be treated with so much suspicion as not to be thought worthy of being trusted to set a drunkard in the stocks.[[171]]

Defoe further declares, that, so far as it respects himself, he has not the least objection to the “Occasional Conformity Bill” becoming law. He has no notion of “Christians of an amphibious nature, who have such preposterous consciences that they can believe one way of worship to be right, and yet serve God another way themselves. This is a strange thing in Israel! It is like a ship with her sails set, some back and some full. It is like a workman that builds with one hand, and pulls down with another. It is like everything which signifies nothing. To say that a man can be of two religions is a contradiction, unless there be two Gods to worship, or he has two souls to save. If it be unlawful for me to dissent, I ought to conform; but if it be unlawful for me to conform, I must dissent. To say that you take the sacrament as a civil act in a church, and as a religious act in a chapel, is playing bo—peep with God Almighty.”[[172]]

Such were the sentiments of Defoe, and he declares that nine—tenths of the Dissenters, numbering altogether about two millions, entertained the same opinions.[[173]] All he asks for is, what the Queen had recommended to parliament, peace and union. In such a case, “the concerns of conscience would never make a rupture in civil society; men would be gentlemen as well as Christians; they would be Dissenters, and yet not Dissenters; and there would be conformity in civil ceremonies, though none in religious. This would make the devil out of love with the English climate, and the people would get to heaven with the less interruption.”[[174]]

Defoe was very far from being one of the mildest and most moderate of Dissenters; and yet, who can carp at sentiments like these?

There can be no doubt that blackguards, calling themselves Dissenters, annually joined in the profane, bacchanalian revelries of the Calves—head Club; but, on the other hand, it is equally certain that some of the High Church party, with a direct reference to the death of King William being said to have been immediately occasioned by his horse stumbling over a mole—hill, were accustomed to drink a health to the “little gentleman dressed in velvet,”[[175]] and to the horse which so fatally stumbled over the insignificant heap of earth that had been raised by his proboscis[proboscis].[[176]]

Defoe complains that the same party “endeavoured, by calumny and reproach, to blacken the Dissenters with crimes of which they were innocent;”[[177]] that “railing pamphlets, buffooning them and dressing them up in the bear’s skin for all the dogs in the street to bait them,” were published; “and that railing sermons, exciting the people to hate them,” were preached. He says “they were threatened with the repeal of the Toleration Act, blackened with slanders, and bullied with bloody flags, defiances, and Billingsgate language from the press and from the pulpit; their meeting houses were represented as houses of sedition, and they daily suffered from the indignities of harebrained priests, buffooning poets, and clubs of insolent pamphleteers.”[[178]]