Bar.

This was not punishment, but triumph; and as De Foe wrote in his "Hymn to the Pillory."

"Shame, like the exhalations of the sun,

Falls back where first the motion was begun;

And he who for no crime shall on thy brows appear,

Bears less reproach than they who placed him there!"

With the exception of Temple Bar, which is somewhat in the same condition as when De Foe was pilloried in front of it, little more than the mere sites of his residences and places of punishment remain. Freeman's Yard had, in 1850, been

"recently taken down to admit of larger houses and larger rents;" the Exchange was burnt down in 1838, and replaced by the present noble building; and the "Tun," the " Conduit," and the "Standard," have been long lost to Cornhill.*

De Foe, though utterly ruined, in a pecuniary sense, by this atrocious sentence, stood firm, like a second Andrew Marvel, against the offers of the Government to bribe his pen. Happily, genius was true to itself; and the demands of bigotry, which were every hour on the increase, needed such corrective: for, not content with full possession of the endowments of the Establishment, and the exclusion of Dissenters from all participation therein, the High Church party made no secret of their intention with respect to the schools of Dissenters, should the power be theirs —nor, indeed, with respect to the liberty of the press, which, in order to restrain by methods in vogue before the Revolution, they had the effrontery to style "licentious." In this cause De Foe again wielded his all-powerful pen. It was just at this date that the Bill against Occasional Conformity was again defeated-though with such allies as the queen and a Tory ministry, the ecclesiastical party looked forward to golden days for their Church militant; whilst, from their own ascendancy and the spirit which pervaded the Legislature, it might have been supposed that the nation was retracing its steps to former days of priestly domination. But, though the Bill against Occasional Conformity was thus temporarily lost, the Statute of Mortmain was repealed; and to commemorate this accession to ecclesiastical wealth and power, a medal was struck by the order of both Houses of Convocation.

De Foe had been now, for some time, a resident at Stoke Newington. Fleetwood was gone to his last rest in Bunhill Fields; but Sir John Hartopp, his son-in-law, and Dr. Watts, tutor to Hartopp's children, were his contemporaries. These men of similar views must have been known to each other; and the facts that, at this date, the Dissenters of Newington built themselves a meeting-house, and that De Foe was very busy in procuring a refuge in the village for some of the poor Germans that had fled from religious persecution in the Palatinate, lond probability to our supposition. He tried to procure these poor foreigners an allotment of waste land, though unsuccessfully. It was whilst residing here that his prognostications, with respect to the effects of a political religion, and of the doctrine of absolute submission, preached from countless pulpits, were fulfilled. On the 5th of November in that year, 1709, Dr. Sacheverell, now chaplain at St. Saviour's, Southwark, preached another of his famous sermons, the arguments of which were such, as De Foe said, "that if the king commanded my head, and sent his messenger to fetch it, I was bound to submit, and stand still whilst it was cut off." This celebrated performance was delivered before the city magistrates at St. Paul's, and was entitled the "Perils of False

Brethren." It was a denunciation, as De Foe well said, against "everything but papists and popery," though "I really think," he adds, "these ecclesiastical faggotsticks, when they are thus lighted at both ends, do no harm. They awake the people and bring them to their senses; and these senses are their protection against all the high-flying lunaries of the age."* A specimen or two of this inflammatory discourse will be sufficient to prove the lamentable effects of mixing up religious topics with secular affairs, and of making the pulpit, not the place from whence the people should receive their best lessons of peace, charity, and freedom, but of doctrines begot by ignorance and the grossest corruptions of social and political morality. No one can

wade through the majority of Sacheverell's sermons-a thing we have been at pains to do without some degree of indignation, if an English heart beats in his breast. The term, "False Brethren," Sacheverell had taken from the mouths of Sharp, Archbishop of York, and Atterbury, Dean of Carlisle; and, after calling all Dissenters by this name, and affirming that union of Church and State is the most perfect thing in the world, he thus proceeds with what he styles "a fundental doctrine," calling those who dissent from it "filthy drones, presumptuous and self-willed men, and despisers of dominion and government." "The grand security of our Government, and the very pillar on which it stands, is founded upon the steady taking of the

Review, vol. iv. p. 473.

subjects' obligation to absolute and unconditional obedience to the supreme power in all things lawful, and the utter illegality of resistance upon any pretence whatsoever." “These false brethren in our government do not singly and in private shed their poison, but, what is lamentable to be spoken, are suffered to combine into bodies and seminaries, wherein atheism, deism, tritheism, arianism, with all the hellish principles of fanaticism, regicide, and anarchy, are openly professed and taught, to corrupt and debauch the youth of the nation in all parts of it down to posterity, to the present reproach and future extirpation of our laws and religion. Certainly the Toleration. was never intended to indulge and cherish such monsters and vipers in our bosom, that scatter their pestilence at our doors, and will rend, distract, and confound the best settled constitution in the world."* "If such were permitted to enter the Church, it would be a den of thieves. . . . For they are miscreants," "begot 'in rebellion, born in sedition, and nursed up in faction;" "their doctrines crucify God afresh," and the believers in such doctrines must be left "to the lake which burns with fire and brimstone," and to "the devil and his angels." This tirade the pulpit masquerader winds up by bidding "the supreme pastors thunder anathemas on their heads."+

Contempt would have been the best punishment for this conceited tool of faction, who, as the Duchess of Marlborough remarked at the time, "had not learning enough to write or speak true English," and who in one of his discourses talks of "parallel lines meeting in a centre." But the temper perhaps as much as the necessities of the times did not permit this. The two Houses of Parliament thought it necessary to notice the doctrines proclaimed from the pulpit by the high elergy; Sacheverell was impeached, and there can be no doubt that the proceedings at his trial effected the grand point of bringing the antagonistic principles of resistance and non-resistance into more conspicuous and decisive conflict. "It matters little what they do with the man," wrote De Foe, "the principle is the plague-sore that runs upon the nation; and its contagion infects our gentry, our clergy, our politics, and the loyalty, zeal, and peace of the whole island." The result of these pulpit-politics he thus admirably states: These abused notions would subject all our liberties to the arbitrary lust of a single person; they would expose us to all kinds of tyranny, and subvert the very foundation on which we stand; they would destroy, unquestioned, the sovereignty of our laws, which for so many ages have triumphed over the invasions and usurpations of ambitious princes; they would denude us of the beautiful garment of liberty, and prostitute the honour of the nation to the mechanism of slavery; they would divest God of His praise in giving His creatures a right of governing themselves, and charge heaven with having newly subjected mankind to the crime of tyranny."

* Perils of False Brethren, by Henry Sacheverell, p. 15.

Review, vol. iv. p. 476.

+ Ibid. p. 20.

The excitement caused by Sacheverell's trial proves how intensely it was a party question; the Whigs on the one hand determining to expose doctrines subversive of all the blessings which the nation had gained by the Revolution; the Tories, more especially the High Church portion of them, making use of it on the other, to uphold, through an advocacy of their champion, the principle of absolute submission. Yet it was well for Sacheverell, as De Foe wrote, "that what he said was not true ... "for the constitution which he has insulted, is now his safety. Had the foundation stood upon the absolute subjection of the subject to the supreme power, he had been left to her Majesty's immediate correction, and she might have sent her guards to convey him from the pulpit to the gallows."*

This

The proceedings throughout and following this trial, show how little the people are guided by abstract considerations in questions of a political or religious nature. For one of the profoundest evils of ignorance is this-that an inflated demagogue can as much arouse and lead the sympathies of the multitude as a wiser man. was especially the case throughout the last century, when not even the pretence of education existed for the people. Sacheverell's trial lasted three weeks, during which time he lodged in the Temple, and was daily attended to and from Westminster by an immense mob, who shouted before him, and paid him all the honours of an ambassador of State. When he had retired, to win fresh glory amidst his sympathising friends, this mob divided itself into separate bodies, of two or three thousand each, and proceeding in various directions to the most frequented dissenting meeting-houses, broke open seven of them. The first which came under their vengeance was one in Carey Street, Lincoln's Inn, belonging to Mr. Burgess. They tore down the pulpit and the pews, sacked his house which adjoined the chapel, and made bonfires of the plunder in Lincoln's Inn Fields and Drury Lane. It was with difficulty that either building was saved from the flames. In this instance, as in the others, the mob was led by well-dressed persons, who, as proved in the trial of several of the rioters, made themselves conspicuous in the work of destruction; † mounting the pulpits, flourishing the cushions, tearing up the books, and joining in the insane cry of "High Church and Sacheverell." Mr. Earle's meeting-house and dwelling in Long Acre, suffered a like fate, and great havoc was committed at Mr. Taylor's, in Leather Lane, Mr. Bradbury's near Fleet Street, and at another meeting-house in Clerkenwell. A stop was put to these proceedings by the queen's guard, or there is no saying where this party-vengeance may have ended, as the Bank of England was threatened, as well as several of the houses of such bishops as were of the Whig principles. A few ringleaders were arrested, tried, but subsequently pardoned; whilst those who had incited the riots, nay, in some cases headed the mobs, and who were, as it was well known,