The events which preceded the revolution of 1688; the undisguised
adherence of the king to the Church of Rome; the partial toleration of
the despised Quakers and Anabaptists; the gradual relaxation of the
severity of the penal laws against Papists and Dissenters, preparing the
way for the royal proclamation of entire liberty of conscience throughout
the British realm, allowing the crop-eared Puritan and the Papist priest
to build conventicles and mass houses under the very eaves of the palaces
of Oxford and Canterbury; the mining and countermining of Jesuits and
prelates, are detailed with impartial minuteness. The secret springs of
the great movements of the time are laid bare; the mean and paltry
instrumentalities are seen at work in the under world of corruption,
prejudice, and falsehood. No one, save a blind, unreasoning partisan of
Catholicism or Episcopacy, can contemplate this chapter in English
history without a feeling of disgust. However it may have been overruled
for good by that Providence which takes the wise in their own craftiness,
the revolution of 1688, in itself considered, affords just as little
cause for self-congratulation on the part of Protestants as the
substitution of the supremacy of the crowned Bluebeard, Henry VIII.
Pages:
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58