Such were the sentiments of Defoe, and he declares that nine—tenths of the Dissenters, numbering altogether about two millions, entertained the same opinions.[173] All he asks for is, what the Queen had recommended to parliament, peace and union. In such a case, “the concerns of conscience would never make a rupture in civil society; men would be gentlemen as well as Christians; they would be Dissenters, and yet not Dissenters; and there would be conformity in civil ceremonies, though none in religious. This would make the devil out of love with the English climate, and the people would get to heaven with the less interruption.”[174] ----- Footnote 173: Defoe’s _Dissenter Misrepresented_. Footnote 174: Defoe’s _Challenge of Peace_. ----- Defoe was very far from being one of the mildest and most moderate of Dissenters; and yet, who can carp at sentiments like these? There can be no doubt that blackguards, calling themselves Dissenters, annually joined in the profane, bacchanalian revelries of the Calves—head Club; but, on the other hand, it is equally certain that some of the High Church party, with a direct reference to the death of King William being said to have been immediately occasioned by his horse stumbling over a mole—hill, were accustomed to drink a health to the “little gentleman dressed in velvet,”[175] and to the horse which so fatally stumbled over the insignificant heap of earth that had been raised by his proboscis.[176] ----- Footnote 175: Chadwick’s _Life of Defoe_, p. 144. Footnote 176: Defoe’s _Mock Mourners_. ----- Defoe complains that the same party “endeavoured, by calumny and reproach, to blacken the Dissenters with crimes of which they were innocent;”[177] that “railing pamphlets, buffooning them and dressing them up in the bear’s skin for all the dogs in the street to bait them,” were published; “and that railing sermons, exciting the people to hate them,” were preached. He says “they were threatened with the repeal of the Toleration Act, blackened with slanders, and bullied with bloody flags, defiances, and Billingsgate language from the press and from the pulpit; their meeting houses were represented as houses of sedition, and they daily suffered from the indignities of harebrained priests, buffooning poets, and clubs of insolent pamphleteers.”[178] ----- Footnote 177: _Inquiry into Occasional Conformity._ Footnote 178: Defoe’s _Challenge of Peace_. -----