general the sole end for which they would deem such a reform worth attempting. Nor could it be dissembled that, so long as the endowments of a national church are supposed to require a sort of politic organisation within the commonwealth, and a busy spirit of faction for their security, it will be convenient for the governors of the state, whenever they find this spirit adverse to them, as it was at the revolution, to preserve the strength of the dissenting sects as a counterpoise to that dangerous influence which, in protestant churches, as well as that of Rome, has sometimes set up the interest of one order against that of the community. And though the church of England made a high vaunt of her loyalty, yet, as Lord Shrewsbury told William of the tories in general, he must remember that he was not their king; of which indeed he had abundant experience. A still more material reason against any alteration in the public liturgy and ceremonial religion at that feverish crisis, unless with a much more decided concurrence of the nation than could be obtained, was the risk of nourishing the schism of the non-jurors. These men went off from the church on grounds merely political, or at most on the pretence that the civil power was incompetent to deprive bishops of their ecclesiastical jurisdiction; to which none among the laity, who did not adopt the same political tenets, were likely to pay attention. But the established liturgy was, as it is at present, in the eyes of the great majority, the distinguishing mark of the Anglican church, far more indeed than episcopal government, whereof so little is known by the mass of the people that its abolition would make no perceptible difference in their religion. Any change, though for the better, would offend those prejudices of education and habit, which it requires such a revolutionary commotion of the public mind as the sixteenth century witnessed, to subdue, and might fill the jacobite conventicles with adherents to the old church. It was already the policy of the non-juring clergy to hold themselves up in this respectable light, and to treat the Tillotsons and Burnets as equally schismatic in discipline and unsound in theology. Fortunately, however, they fell into the snare which the established church had avoided; and deviating, at least in their writings, from the received standard of Anglican orthodoxy, into what the people saw with most jealousy, a sort of approximation to the church of Rome, gave their opponents an advantage in controversy, and drew farther from that part of the clergy who did not much dislike their political creed. They were equally injudicious and neglectful of the signs of the times, when they promulgated such extravagant assertions of sacerdotal power as could not stand with the regal supremacy, or any subordination to the state. It was plain, from the writings of Leslie and other leaders of their party, that the mere restoration of the house of