The pulpits thereupon began to ring, but the Government made a commendable attempt to muzzle the preachers, whether the latter were blind adversaries or blinder advocates. The employment of violent and malevolent terms against any persons whatsoever was prohibited. The ‘intermeddling,’ in sermons, with affairs of state, was strictly forbidden. The authorities, in fact, enjoined Christian ministers to observe the charity which is the leading feature in Christianity. The ministers, for the most part, claimed and exercised a rather unchristian liberty. Foremost among the blaring trumpeters who sounded on the Hanoverian side was White Kennett, Dean of Peterborough. Kennett was a man who, in his early days, had offended the Whigs, by his political publications; and, something later, had gratified the Tories by putting forth an English translation of Pliny’s panegyric upon Trajan, which was supposed to apply to James II.; while, at the same time, he displeased the Jacobites by declaiming against popery and by refusing to read the royal declaration of indulgence. The Whigs whom he had offended, he appeased by his fierce opposition to Sacheverel. Kennett was a man of great parts, as it is called, and was particularly qualified for maintaining his opinions in a controversy. Scholar, gentleman, priest and politician, he steadily went up the ladder of preferment, till his merits and patronage had now brought him to the deanery of Peterborough and the rectory of St. Mary, Aldermanbury ◆[Sidenote: _A FAMOUS SERMON._]◆. It was in the church so named that Kennett, on September 25th, 1715, preached his famous sermon on witchcraft. The text was taken from 1 Samuel, xv. 23:――‘Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry. Because thou hast rejected the word of the Lord, He hath also rejected thee from being king.’ The sermon, a long one, and full of an invective that almost reaches ferocity, is stuffed with inflammatory politics from beginning to end, incendiary matter which _then_ made men half-mad with joy or indignation, but which seems _now_ a poor thing save in weight of mischievous words. The preacher, of course, proved to his own satisfaction that all concerned in promoting the imminent rebellion were bewitched by the devil; that stubbornness in opposing the royal authority was the iniquity and idolatry alluded to in the text; and that the Pretender, like his father, had lost the crown because he did not care to be of the true community of faith. The sermon was ‘inspired,’ according to the Whig papers;――but by the devil, according to the Tories and Tory critics in the clubs. Art took a curious revenge for this discourse. ◆[Sidenote: _SATIRICAL ART._]◆ An altarpiece was painted for St. Mary’s, Whitechapel, by order of Welton, the Jacobite rector. The subject was The Last Supper. It gained a certain modest amount of admiration, till some spectator remarked that Judas Iscariot