of Christ, and scandalize his church with the filthy love of gain; aspiring also to sit, the closest and heaviest of all tyrants, upon the conscience; and fall notoriously into the same sins, whereof so lately and so loud they accused the prelates; as God rooted out those immediately before, so will he root out them, their imitators; and to vindicate his own glory and religion, will uncover their hypocrisy to the open world, and visit upon their own heads, that curse the mercy, but more like atheists, they have mocked the vengeance of God, and the zeal of his people."

These extracts will show the principles on which our noble patriot exposed the jure divino selfish, bigoted, sycophantic Presbyterians, who cared not, it should seem, so that the system, whatever it was, "worked well" for them, if all the other sects had perished by the sword of the magistrate, upon the ground of there "being no power but of God," and "those who resisted the power procured to themselves damnation." By putting the argument on the right footing," the sovereignty of the people," he proved, that it was the duty of the subject to obey, when the monarch governed by law, protecting his subjects; and their duty to resist, when the king, regarding neither the law nor the common good, reigned for himself alone!

To bring the matter home to their breasts and to their bosoms, he gives the Sion College passive-obedience and non-resistance reverends this home thrust:

"But this, I doubt not to affirm, that the Presbyterians, who now so much condemn deposing, were the men themselves who deposed the king, and cannot, with all their shifting and relapsing, wash off the guiltiness from their own hands. For they themselves, by these their late doings, have made it guiltiness, and turned their own unwarrantable actions into rebellion."

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He, who but erewhile in the pulpit was a cursed tyrant, an enemy to God and saints, laden with all the innocent blood in these kingdoms, and so to be fought against; is now, though nothing penitent or altered from his first principles, a lawful magistrate, a Sovran Lord, the Lord's anointed, not to be touched, though by themselves imprisoned, as if this only were obedience to preserve the meer useless bulk of his person, and that only in prison, not in the field, and to disobey his commands, deny him his dignity and office, every where to resist his power, but when they think it only surviving in their own fact."

I copy the concluding paragraph of the se

cond edition, addressed chiefly to the Presbyterians ::-"And indeed I find it generally the cleere and positive determination of them all, (not prelatical, or of this late faction subprelatical,) who have written on this argument, that to do justice on a lawless king, is to a private man unlawful, to an inferior magistrate lawful: or if they were divided in opinion, yet greater than these have alleged, or of more certainty in the church, there can be more produced. If any man shall goe about by producing other testimonies to disable these, or by bringing these against themselves in other cited passages of their books, he will not only fail to make good that false and impudent assertion of those mutinous ministers, that deposing or punishing of a king or tyrant, is against the constant judgment of all Protestant Divines, its being quite the contrary; but will prove rather that he intended not, that the judgment of Divines, if it be so various and inconstant to itself, is not considerable, or to be esteemed at all. Ere which be yielded, as I hope it never will, these ignorant assertors in their own art will have proved themselves more and more, not to be Protestant Divines, whose constant judgment in this point they have so audaciously belayed, but rather to be a pack of hungry church-wolves, who in the

steps of Simon Magus their father, following the hot scent of double livings and pluralities, advowsons, donations, inductions, augmentations, though uncall'd to the flock of Christ, but by the mere suggestion of their Bellin, like those priests of Bel, whose pranks Daniel found out, have got possession, or rather seized upon the pulpit, as the strong hold and fortress of their sedition and rebellion against the civil magistrate, whose friendly and victorious hand having rescued them from the Bishops, their insulting Lords, fed them plenteously both in public and in private, raised them to be high and rich, of poor and base; only suffered not their covetousness and fierce ambition, which as the fruit that sent out their fellow locusts, hath been ever bottomless, and boundless, to interpose in all things, and over all their impetuous ignorance and importunity."

persons,

It will be seen that MILTON, who had certainly contributed largely towards procuring for the Presbyterians their importance in the state, held their political principles in perfect abhorrence, whatever he might have thought of the piety, usefulness, and learning, of many of the ministers who held those popish, persecuting sentiments. The fact is, they had no correct views in regard to the inalienable right of every man to derive his religious views from the Bible, according to the

prayerful exercise of his own judgment, and to act out his principles by endeavouring, by every means, to propagate them.*

Soon after the death of the king, the Commons voted the House of Peers to be useless and dangerous; and an act was accordingly passed for abolishing it. It is said that Cromwell opposed

* That the reader may judge of the spirit of popery "that prevailed in opposition to liberty of conscience," I give the sentiments of the English Papists and the Protestants in the reign of Elizabeth. They are founded on Rev. xvii. 6. And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and of the blood of the martyrs of Jesus, and when I had seen her, I marvelled with great admiration."

The Rhemish translators say, It is plain that the woman means the whole corps of all the persecutors that have and shall shed so much blood of the just; of the prophets, apostles, and other martyrs, from the beginning of the world unto the end. The Protestants foolishly expound it of Rome, for that there they put hereticks to death, and allow of their punishment in other countries; but their blood is not called the blood of saints, no more than the blood of thieves, man-killers, and other malefactors, for the shedding of which by the order of justice no commonwealth shall answer."

To this Fulk, the Protestant commentator, replies: "They whom you call heretickes, for the most part, and that are in any great number put to death at Rome, and by the tyranny of the Romish Inquisition, are the true Christians and saints here spoken of, whose godly way you call heresy, as the persecuting Jews called it in St. Paul, Acts, xxiv. 14. Therefore, though we allow the punishment of heretickes both