To hate them because they are persecuted, and not to be reconciled to
them when they are ready to suffer rather than receive all the
advantages that can be gained by a criminal compliance, is a principle
no sort of Christians can own, since it would give an objection to
them never to be answered.
Think a little who they were that promoted your former persecutions,
and then consider how it will look to be angry with the instruments,
and at the same time to make a league with the authors of your
sufferings.
Have you enough considered what will be expected from you? Are you
ready to stand in every borough by virtue of a _congé d'élire_, and
instead of election be satisfied if you are returned?
Will you, in parliament, justify the dispensing power, with all its
consequences, and repeal the test, by which you will make way for the
repeal of all the laws that were made to preserve your religion, and
to enact others that shall destroy it?
Are you disposed to change the liberty of debate into the merit of
obedience; and to be made instruments to repeal or enact laws, when
the Roman Consistory are Lords of the Articles?
Are you so linked to your new friends as to reject any indulgence a
parliament shall offer you, if it shall not be so comprehensive as to
include the Papists in it?
Consider that the implied conditions of your new treaty are no less
than that you are to do everything you are desired, without examining;
and that for this pretended liberty of conscience, your real freedom
is to be sacrificed; your former faults hang like chains still about
you, you are let loose only upon bail; the first act of non-compliance
sendeth you to gaol again.
You may see that the Papists themselves do not rely upon the legality
of this power which you are to justify, since the being so very
earnest to get it established by a law, and the doing such very hard
things in order, as they think, to obtain it, is a clear evidence that
they do not think that the single power of the Crown is in this case a
good foundation; especially when this is done under a prince so very
tender of the rights of sovereignty that he would think it a
diminution to his prerogative, where he conceiveth it strong enough to
go alone, to call in the legislative help to strengthen and support
it.
You have formerly blamed the Church of England, and not without
reason, for going so far as they did in their compliance; and yet so
soon as they stopped, you see they are not only deserted, but
prosecuted. Conclude, then, from this example, that you must either
break off your friendship or resolve to have no bounds in it. If they
do succeed in their design, they will leave you first: if they do, you
must either leave them, when it will be too late for your safety, or
else, after the squeaziness of starting at a surplice, you must be
forced to swallow Transubstantiation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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