The rebellion sprung not from them, but from the merchants, lawyers, and clergy, who were never inimical to the aristocratic branch of the Government, provided they were admitted to share in it according to their merits. It is true, they, like Calvin, the author of their religion, maintained that no man can merit anything of the Great Eternal; nevertheless, they thought they had merited the aristocratic honours which emanate from earthly kings; while kings and nobles of the earth imagine themselves to have merited more than they yet enjoy--even heaven itself--only because they happen to enjoy the honour of being descendants of heroic ancestors. England had also been as careful to keep to herself her religion and bishops as her civil constitutions and baronies. A million of Churchmen in America had been considered as not worthy of one bishop, while eight millions in South-Britain were scarcely honoured with enough with twenty-six: an insult on common justice, which would have extinguished every spark of affection in America for the English Church, and created an everlasting schism, like that between Constantinople and Rome, had not the majority of the American episcopal clergy been possessed of less ambition than love and zeal. They had suffered on both sides of the Atlantic in name and property, for their endeavours to keep up a union between the Mother Country and her children; but all their arguments and persuasions were insufficient to convince their brethren that England would in future be more generous towards her colonies. One of the first fruits of the grand continental meeting of dissenting divines at Newhaven was a coalition between the republican and the minor part of the episcopal clergy, who were soon joined by the merchants, lawyers, and planters, with a view of procuring titles, ordination, and government, independent of Great Britain. Such were the real sources of the rebellion in America. The invasion of this or that colonial right, the oppression of this or that act of Parliament, were merely the pretended causes of it, which the ill-humour of a misgoverned people prompted them eagerly to hold up--causes which would never have found existence, whose existence had never been necessary, if a better system of American policy had been adopted; but, being produced, the shadow of complaint was exhibited instead of the substance, pretence instead of reality. Every republican pulpit resounded with invectives against the King, Lords, and Commons, who claimed a power to tax and govern the people of America--a power which their charters and ancestors knew nothing of. “Britons,” they said, “call our property theirs; they consider us as slaves--as hewers of wood and drawers of water to the descendants of those tyrants of Church and State who in the last century expelled and persecuted our fathers into the wilds of America. We have charters sacred as Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights.”