I shall only beg leave to add to them one very great living authority, the present Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, who, in a late famous trial, did openly, before Queen, Lords, and Commons, maintain the lawfulness of the Revolution under the notion of resistance, and assert, before the most solemn and august assembly of Europe, that there are extraordinary cases, cases of necessity, which are implied, though not expressed, in the generai rule— that is, which are so plain and so open to the common sense of mankind that, even whilst you are declaring resistance in all cases to be unlawful, you are of necessity understood to mean that resistance in some cases is lawful. I am pleased to observe, that no one ever put the matter so strongly, or carried it so high as this great man did upon that critical occasion. At the same time he was so just to his country as to declare that such a case undoubtedly the Revolution was, when our late unhappy sovereign then upon the throne, misled by evil counsellors, endeavoured to subvert and extirpate the Protestant religion and the laws and liberties of the kingdom.

THE CRISIS.

IT is every man's duty to correct the extravagances of his will, in order to enjoy life as becomes a rational being; but we cannot possess our souls with pleasure and satisfaction except we preserve to ourselves that inestimable blessing which we call liberty. By liberty I desire to be understood to mean the happiness of men's living under laws of their own making, by their personal consent or that of their representatives.

Without this the distinctions amongst mankind are but gentler degrees of misery; for as the true life of man consists in conducting it according to his own just sentiments and innocent inclinations, his being is degraded below that of a free agent, which Heaven has made him, when his affections and passions are no longer governed by the dictates of his own mind and the interests of human society, but by the arbitrary unrestrained will of another.

Without liberty, even health and strength, and all the advantages bestowed on us by Nature and Provi

dence, may, at the will of a tyrant, be employed to our own ruin, and that of our fellow-creatures.

Liberty is essential to our happiness, and they who resign life itself rather than part with it do only a prudent action; but those who lay it down, and voluntarily expose themselves to death in behalf of their friends and country, do an heroic one. The more exalted part of our species are moved by such generous impulses as these; but even the community, the mass of mankind, when convinced of the danger of their civil rights, are anxious of preserving to themselves that dearest of all possessions, liberty.

The late kingdoms of England and Scotland. have contended for it from age to age with too great a price of blood and treasure to be given for the purchase of any other blessing, but laid out parsimoniously when we consider they have transmitted this to their posterity.

But since, by I know not what fatality, we are of late grown supine, and our anxiety for it is abated, in proportion to the danger to which it is every day more exposed by the artful and open attacks of the enemies of our Constitution, it is a seasonable and honest office to look into our circumstances, and let the enemies of our present

establishment behold the securities which the laws of our country have given those who dare assert their liberties, and the terrors which they have

pronounced against those who dare undermine them. For, whatever is the prospect before our eyes, it is the business of every honest man to look up with a spirit that becomes honesty, and to do what in him lies for the improvement of our present condition, which nothing but our own pusillanimity can make desperate.

The most destructive circumstance in our affairs seems to be that, by the long and repeated insinuations of our enemics, many are worn into a kind of doubt of their own cause, and think with patience of what is suggested in favour of contrary pretensions. The most obvious method of reviving the proper sentiments in the minds of men for what they ought to esteem most dear, is to show that our cause has in it all the sanctions of honour, truth, and justice, and that we are, by all the laws of God and man, instated in a condition of enjoying religion, life, liberty, and property, rescued from the most imminent danger of having them all for ever depend upon the arbitrary power of a Popish prince.

We should have been chained down in this abject condition in the reign of the late King James, had not God Almighty in mercy given us the late happy Revolution, by that glorious instrument of his providence the great and memorable King William. But though this wonderful deliverance happened as it were but yesterday, yet such is the inadvertency or ingratitude of some amongst us, that they

seem not only to have forgotten the deliverer, but even the deliverance itself. Old men act as if they believed the danger which then hung over their heads was only a dream, the wild effects of illgrounded imaginary fears; and young men, as if they had never heard from their fathers, nor read of what passed in this kingdom, at a period no farther backward than the space of five-and-twenty years.

I flatter myself that if the passages which happened in those days, the resolutions of the nation thereupon, and the just provisions made from time to time against our falling into the same disasters, were fairly stated and laid in one view, all indirect arts and mean subtleties practised to weaken our securities would be frustrated, and vanish before the glaring light of law and reason.

I shall not govern myself on this occasion by the partial relation of particular persons or parties, but by the sense of the whole people, by the sense of the Houses of Lords and Commons, the representative body of the whole nation, in whose resolutions, according to the different state of things, the condition of the kingdom, by those who had the greatest stakes in it, has been from time to time plainly, impartially, and pathetically expressed.

I shall begin with the Act of Parliament made in England in the second session of the first year of the late King William and Queen Mary, intituled "An Act declaring the Rights and Liberties of