What was the result of all this? The greatest bitterness was created, and pamphlets, full of scurrility and violence, literally swarmed. Among the writers of these productions, Daniel Defoe was the most eminent. The pamphlet which, above all others, occasioned the greatest commotion, was his “Shortest Way with Dissenters; or, Proposals for the Establishment of the Church.” This was published anonymously, and pretended to be written by one of the High Church party, and to set forth their complaints and wishes. The Church is said to have harboured Dissenters too long, and to have nourished the viperous brood till they hissed and flew in the face of the mother that had cherished them. The Church had been huffed and bullied by the Act of Toleration, and canting synagogues had been set up at its very doors. The Dissenters had butchered one king, deposed another, and made a mock monarch of a third, and yet expected to be employed by the fourth. If James I. had sent all the Puritans in England away to the West Indies, the Church of England would have been kept undivided and entire; but these Puritans, to requite the lenity of the father, took up arms against the son, put to death God’s anointed, and set up a sordid impostor who had neither the title nor the understanding to manage the nation. Coming into power, they shared the church lands among their soldiers, and turned the clergy out to starve. During the reign of their own King William, they had crept into all places of trust and profit, and had been preferred to the highest posts in England; while, in Scotland, they had trampled down the sacred orders, suppressed the Episcopacy, and made an entire conquest of the Church. For such reasons, they ought to be rooted out from the face of the land, and never would the nation enjoy uninterrupted union and tranquillity till their spirit of Whiggism, faction, and schism were melted down like the old money. It was true, that Queen Anne had promised them toleration, but she had also promised to protect and defend the Church; and if she could not effectually do that without the destruction of the Dissenters, she must, of course, dispense with one promise in order to fulfil the other. The Parliament, protected and encouraged by a Church of England queen, had now the opportunity to suppress the spirit of enthusiasm, and to free the nation from the vipers that had so long sucked the blood of their mother. If they were permitted to remain, they would corrupt posterity, plunder the estates of the members of the Church, drag their persons to gaols, gibbets, and scaffolds, and swallow up the Church itself in schism, faction, and enthusiasm. If one severe law were made and executed, that all found at a conventicle should be transported, and their preacher be hanged, they would soon all come to church, and an age would make all parties one again. Why should an enthusiast be less a criminal than a Jesuit? Why should the Papist, with his seven sacraments, be worse than a Quaker, with no sacrament at all? Why should religious houses be more intolerable than meeting—houses? What with Popery on the one hand, and schismatics on the other, the Church of England had been crucified between two thieves. Now, let the thieves be crucified, and let the foundations of the Church be established on the destruction of her enemies.

Such is the substance of Defoe’s notorious pamphlet. For a time, and to some extent, the High Church party believed it to be a genuine production; and one of them, in a letter, declared that, next to the Holy Bible and Sacred Comments, it was the most valuable thing that his library contained, and he earnestly prayed that God would put it into the heart of Queen Anne to carry its proposals into execution.[[179]] It is certain that there was nothing in Defoe’s pamphlet but what had been substantially enunciated from scores of High Church pulpits; but now that it was published, and a national commotion was created, and especially, as soon as it was suspected that the writer was not a Churchman, but a despicable Dissenter, there was a pretence of the most terrible indignation, and threats of the severest punishment to be inflicted upon the audacious author.

Defoe was suspected, and had to flee for safety. He was advertised in the London Gazette, and £50 was offered by Government for his apprehension. The advertisement describes him as “a middle—sized, spare man, about forty years old, of a brown complexion, and dark—brown coloured hair, but wears a wig; has a hooked nose, a sharp chin, gray eyes, and a large mole near his mouth.” This advertisement is dated January 10, 1703, the year in which Wesley’s letter was published.

Six weeks after, the House of Commons passed a resolution, “That this book (Defoe’s) being full of false and scandalous reflections on parliament, and tending to promote sedition, be burnt by the hands of the common hangman in New Palace Yard.”

Meantime, Defoe was arrested, and, in July 1703, was brought to trial. His sentence was to pay a fine to the Queen of two hundred marks; to stand three times in the pillory; to be imprisoned during the Queen’s pleasure, and to find sureties for his good behaviour for seven years.

In accordance with this sentence, on July 29, Defoe was placed in the pillory before the Royal Exchange; on July 30, near the Conduit in Cheapside; and on July 31, at Temple Bar. Such pillory exhibitions had seldom been witnessed. On each of the three days, thousands of sympathisers accompanied the condemned scribe from Newgate prison to his place of shame, to protect him from hurt or insult, whilst his very pillory was hung with garlands woven by the fingers of his friends.

The pen of Defoe was never plied more busily than while he was in prison. He wrote more church defiances during his year of confinement in Newgate than in any other year of his chequered life. Other persons were equally busy, and in all forms of pamphlet, tract, and broadsheet, the press poured forth its volumes of contention. All classes of society seemed to catch the contagion. Dean Swift, in London at the time, declared that the contention between Church and Dissent was so universal, that the dogs in the streets took it up, and the cats debated the question by night on the tops of the houses; yea, the very ladies were so split asunder into High Church and Low Church, and were so warm in their disputes, as to have no time to say their prayers.

It was in the midst of this excitement that Samuel Wesley’s letter was published by Clavel, and that his controversy with Palmer took place.

But besides having Palmer for an antagonist, Wesley was attacked by his old schoolfellow, the redoubtable Daniel Defoe. This was in a pamphlet published in 1704, and which was probably written in Newgate prison. It was entitled “More Short Ways with the Dissenters.” The Queen having been obliged to dismiss her High Church Cabinet, on account of the storm that had been raised by their attempts to pass the “Occasional Conformity Bill,” and thereby to suppress the Dissenters, Defoe alleges that now another scheme was being concocted for the accomplishment of the self—same purpose. The “new attempt struck at the root of the Dissenters’ interest. It would effectually destroy the succession of them in the nation; for it was intended to prevent them educating their children in their own opinions.”[opinions.”]

He then adds, in reference to Wesley, “If I should say that a mercenary renegado was hired to expose the private academies of the Dissenters, as nurseries of rebellious principles, I should say nothing but what is in too many mouths to remain a secret. The Reverend Mr Wesley, author of two pamphlets calculated to blacken our education in the academies of the Dissenters, ingenuously confesses himself guilty of many crimes in his youth, and is the willinger to confess them, as he would lay them at the door of the Dissenters and their schools, among whom he was educated; though I humbly conceive, it is no more a proof of the immorality of the Dissenters in their schools that he was a little rakish among them, or that he found others among them like himself, than the hanging five students of Cambridge, for robbing on the highway, should prove that padding is a science taught in that university. He takes a great deal of pains to prove, that in these academies were or are taught anti—monarchical principles; but the author of these sheets happens to be one that was educated under the same master that he was taught by, viz., Mr Charles Morton of Newington Green; and I have now by me the manuscripts of science, the exercises of Mr Morton’s school, and, among the rest, those of politics in particular; and I must do that learned gentleman’s memory the justice to affirm, that neither in his system of politics, government, and discipline, nor in any other of the exercises of his school, was there anything taught or encouraged that was antimonarchical, or destructive to the government or constitution of England. Allow, then, that Mr Wesley fell into ill company afterwards; allow we had, and still have worse rakes among us than himself, does this prove that our schools teach men thus, and that the Dissenters, in general, profess principles destructive of monarchy?”