own excellent and matchless constitution, and their own brave and excellent king George: God bless and prosper him, and blast the devi ces of his enemies!

NUMBER 85.

Popery tried by Christianity and Reason, and proved an Enemy to both.

WHATEVER tends to the general good of men, will easily be believed to come from God. Whatever only promotes the interest of particalar men, especially if it be burdensome and injurious to the rest of men, is only the contrivance of particular men, and can never come from God, who made all men, and is "no respecter of persons." To say, that he countenances any narrow selfish craft, to cheat and plunder, and oppress all for the sake of a few, or of many, is not only to belie, but to blaspheme him; as, if the all-wise Creator of men, and preserver of heaven and earth, could descend to low coufederaces and imposture, the more detestable and impious, for profanely usurping the name of piety.

I shall not here enter into a dislpay of the infinite machinery of Popery, obviously framed to cheat and engross the world, to mock God, and to rob and abuse men. I shall at present inquire a little into the notions of charity entertained by the Romish church.

If she want that great characteristical grace, she wants Christianity. Alms and partiality to those of her own fraternity, are only flattery for flattery, the wages of credulity and bondage, all to keep her dupes in good humour, at the expense of truth and their eye-sight.

The genuine trial of charity is, to apply it to people of a different persuasion. If it shew mercy and tenderness, and good will, there; and hope the salvation of their souls, though it condemn their opinions; it is genuine, it is Christian charity. But where it hates, and damns, and persecutes all others; it renounces Christianity, and bears the blackest mark of imposture; at best, of fanaticism.

It is a preposterous notion of God, who formed us all, to conceive, that he is addicted to modes, and guided by names and caprice; and that he hates, and will damn, any human soul for striving to please him the best way it can; much less for disliking any worship, which, however followed and magnified, seems more likely to offend and contradict, than to please the Almighty God, if it be no where commanded in his word, but rather clearly forbidden there. How can a man, who has read the second commandment, bow to an image, much less pray to it? He who contradicts this divine command, is a daring impostor, a revolter from God, and a tyrant to men. His guilt and tyranny are still greater, if he curse or punish any man for obeying God, rather than men. By it he avows himself an Idolater, a champion for idolatry,

an apostate from God, and an implacable foe to all who worship God in spirit and in truth.

If an uncharitable sentence could be warranted in any Christian, it would surely be warranted against such, who contradict the most explicit, the most positive laws of God; and at the same time pretend to be his only followers and favourites; and therefore deny his mercy and salvation to all human race besides. If ever persecution can be justified, it is so, when it is inflicted upon persecutors. Do not they, who are armed to destroy all, invite destruction from all? Are they, who want all charity, and shew no mercy, intitled to mercy or charity? Whoever follows reason, and the Bible, is an object of horror and vengeance to Papists, who lock up the Scriptures, and banish the use of reason: Popery damns all who adhere to either, burns all that it damns, and thus exposes itself to be used by others, as it always uses others.

The plea, that they only are in the right, and all others in the wrong, is the stale plea of all persecutors and fanatics, from the Pope down to Muggleton; and may be turned by every one upon every one. Muggleton was as free of his damnation to all who would not believe implicitly in him, as his holiness could be; he even endowed his wife Mary with the power of damning. And doubtless the sentence of that cursing pair would have proved equally tragical with that of the Pope, had their means been equal.

All these profane cursers, whether they act from craziness or craft, set up at once for omnipotence, and indeed for all the attributes of God, in attempting to do what God never did, by fixing all the endless roamings of the human soul, and obliging all men to reason and to dream alike, with faculties infinitely unlike. What two men upon earth had ever exactly the same person, features, sensations, and perceptions? Are not the speculations of men still more various, infinitely more wandering and unfixed? And what can be more frantic, than to blame men for differing, when nature itself, and consequently necessity, hath made them to differ? To curse men for so differing, is profane ; to torture and burn them for it, is diabolical.

Persecutors therefore, having renounced Christianity and reason, ought to be renounced by both. Persecution is destructive of human society. Men eternally differing in notions one from another, must, when thus animated, for ever be destroying one another: and, to drive all such difference out of the world, there must be but one man left in it. This is the only, and the last, certain expedient. So that persecution infers the extirpation of men, as well as of religion and reason; at least, unless all men surrender themselves implicitly to hypocrisy, and to eternal vassalage.

Such are the genius, such the principles, and such the everlasting practices of Popery. Papists are bound in conscience to destroy us Protestants. He is no Catholic who will not destroy heresy, and consequently heretics; and he, who is not a Catholic, is, according to Catholic charity, surely damned.

Could the wit of man, could the malice of Judas, or of Satan, frame a more shocking system, a more dreadful conspiracy against human reason, human society, human peace, religion, and the lives of men?

Such a shocking system, such a dreadful conspiracy, is Popery, yet Papists call themselves the only Christians. To profess the name of Christ, to believe in him, to imitate him, and to die for him, is all nothing, without being a Papist; nay, you are damned for all this, unless you are a Papist; damned in the next world, and burned in this. Had Popery been contrived by the bitterest, and most sanguinary enemies of Popery, it could not have been contrived more shocking and incredible, than it really is.

Yet this dreadful picture, this devilish spirit of Popery, are so far from provoking its votaries to abhor it, much less to forsake it, that the more dreadful it is, the more they reverence it; they awfully admire, nay, adore, its highest extravagancies, which therefore hold them still the faster. Their Priests are masters of their senses. Who, that believes his senses, can believe what contradicts them all, believe an impossibility, transubstantiation? Their priests govern them by their fears. Their priests can damn or save them; at best they cannot be saved without their priests. Dare they after this contradict their priests.

NUMBER 86.

Warning to Britons, upon the present Rebellion supported by France.

A FRENCH invasion implies a French conquest; conquest implies servitude. He must be fit for Bedlam who dreams that France can mean any thing but our desolation and ruin by endeavouring to force a king upon us, or that they even mean that he shall be king, whatever mock royalty they nominally give him. It is their own interest and dominion only that they seek, to master and crush us for beating and disappointing them: they know that they can never flourish and domineer till they have impoverished and oppressed us: and none but an absolute creature of theirs, one pliable into every form and impression, obsequious to their dictates, and supple to their will, can serve them by domineering over us.

If they found such complaisance from king Charles II. without any claim to the merit of restoring him: If that prince shewed so little gratitude to the English nation, for their zeal and generosity in recalling him, as to sacrifice, as he did during his whole reign, so loyal a people to the unjust views and pernicious ambition of France, and but seemed a Protestant the better to betray his Protestant subjects. If king James II. blindly and ungratefully followed the same course, whilst be had the aukward ambition of aiming at absolute power here, yet was meanly subservient to the dictates and grandeur of France, still more meanly owning the sovereignty of the Pope; though neither France nor the Pope had any share in giving him his crown. If both

and

these princes, only for the sake of making their weak and depraved will a law to their good Protestant subjects, truckled to the will and craft of France and Rome, what is to be expected from one who has no support but theirs, no principles but those of Popery and tyranny; or, if he had other and better principles, dares not maintain them, though he may be allowed to profess them, and practise guile the better to serve the purposes of these his protectors, and his own purposes ?

A ruler imposed upon a country may claim right, but will rule by. force where his right is not owned. They who help him to rule will rule for him, and be his masters, though he bear the name. Neither he nor they will trust a people whom they have once forced. He will not be suffered to trust them if he would. For then he ceases to be independent of those who imposed him. Whoever call in question his right, will pay for their sauciness with their lives. The laws that oppose it will be treason. The acts of violence that support it will be called laws, and the sword will direct, as well as execute the process. Hungry harpies will be craving after prey; vengeance will be hunting for victims; to gorge both sorts, the rich and the guiltless must perish. Wherever there is property there will be guilt: all men will be exposed to suffer, the best most: suffering will be followed with complaint, complaints with punishment. Wise men will excite jealousy great men will be the objects of fear: and as discontents will be constantly and plentifully furnished, fresh terrors to extinguish them will continually he increased, and continually be renewing such discontents.

Here is a dreadful series and intercourse of enmity, where one side only is armed, and void of mercy; as the other is of help and hope. Title, quality, fortune, will be obnoxious and marked; every virtue will become a snare, and whatever furnished out the ease and ornament of life, will become a call for taking life away. The industry of years, the acquisition of ages, the fruits of a thousand cares, will be swept away in a moment, all to reward the guilty authors of such horrible iniquity and combustion. Such will be the penalty exacted for the guilt of fortune and merit; such the price imposed upon public ruin; a price always paying, but never finally paid till all is paid. The course of law, and even of nature, will be inverted, nobility demeaned; meanness exalted; worth punished; guilt rewarded: whatever was once law will be treason; whatever was once treason will be law.

Thus tragical and perishing must be the state of England. What must be the state abroad, but that all Europe must follow the general servitude begun here; and thus deprived of its chief protection and resource, sorrowfully bear the yoke of a restless nation, eager to put chains on all others, though they bear the heaviest themselves?

They had never accomplished the grand design, without the help of the two royal brothers, the English monarchs above mentioned. For, though France made them not, she moulded and managed them. Far from attending to the call of national interest and honour, and asserting the glory of the English diadem, by preserving the balance, and checking the encroachments of France; the two royal brothers encouraged all her encroachments upon all her neighbours, upon the empire, upon Spain, and upon the Dutch, our more intimate neighbours and fellow Protestants; nay, assisted to exteminate the whole Dutch nation, in or

der to make England a more contiguous member of the French monarchy, to which the English monarchs were become mean pensioners and auxiliaries, with the preposterous pride of aiming themselves at absolute power over free subjects, who were too proud to be slaves, especially second-hand slaves to France.

The monarchs of England descended to be the unnatural instrument of exaiting France, and were the authors of all the expense, answerable for all the dreadful wars in Europe ever since. A frown from a king of Great Britain would have made the grand monarch a very harmless neighbour. Would Edward III. would Henry V. nay, would Oliver Cromwell, in king Charles's place, have suffered him to spoil his weakest neighbours, or once to have displayed the Flower-de-luce upon the Rhine or Moselle? Oliver kept him in constant awe; though, for his own ends, such was the unhappy situation of an usurper, he allowed him too much line. The two brothers lacquied to him as their superior, took his hire, and, as it were, wore his livery, and encouraged him in all his perfidious, in all his barbarous invasions.

It was this, this infamous acquiescence and venality from hence, that made him the terror, the oppressor of Europe, and raised his vanity, and his power with it so high, that it required a William III. and a duke of Marlborough, to tame him and take him down. That these two great geniuses in state and war did not thoroughly humble him, was owing to the devilish spirit of party, which generally destroys a country by a pretence of saving it.

France knows that in order to enslave Europe she must begin with Great Britain. Great Britain ought to know, all wise men in it do know, that England has nothing but chains and misery to hope from the policy and friendship of France. This is a dreadful prospect to Britons and Protestants, and the only one, if she succeed. Ought it not to be the first and last resolution of Englishmen and Protestants, that she shall not? What indignation must they not naturally feel against the perfidious, the insolent, and sanguinary efforts of France, and against all who impiously take part with France? Her partizans here, if there be any such, must be the most unnatural of all parricides a glorious spirit appears amongst all classes of men, in spite of all the late pains taken, all the traiterous misrepresentations used to prevent it, to damp it, and to turn the resentment of Englishmen upon the guardians of England, without sparing the highest.

The last revolution was a manifest deliverance from Popery and ty ranny. This would be as manifest a delivery into both. King James deposed himself: he would abolish Parliaments, he would establish Popery; his will was to be a law to his subjects; their consciences must submit to his bigotry. These were grievances indeed, not made, nor to be aggravated, but felt. No wonder he at once lost lords and commons, army, clergy and people. He had incited and even warranted them to desert him, and effectually warned them never to trust him more, whom no oaths nor laws could bind, and who had set up superstition against the gospel, jesuitism against the English hierarchy, acts of state framed by bis Popish wife, and bis Popish priests (all carefully tutored by France) against acts of Parliament.

What are the grievances at present? War and taxes, and foreign subsidies. Heavy evils, without doubt. But, from what causes, and