repined and murmured at than the increase of piety and devotion in it were regarded." Such was the lowering calm of ungrateful discontent, which ushered in a fearful season of crime and punishment, described at large by one who was an illustrious actor on that eventful stage, and composed his history, "that posterity might not be deceived by the prosperity of wickedness into a belief that nothing less than a general combination of an whole nation, and a universal apostacy from their religion and allegiance, could, in so short a time, have produced such a prodigious and total alteration; and that the memory of those, who out of duty and conscience have opposed that torrent which overwhelmed them, may not lose the recompence due to their virtues, but having undergone the injuries and reproaches of that, might find a vindication in a better age." In describing the scenes which ensued, "when an infatuated people, ripe and prepared for destruction, plunged by the just judgment of God into all the perverse actions of folly and madness," he reads us such important lessons as must strike an enlightened public, if recalled to their attention. He tells us, by fatal experience, "that the weak contributed to the designs of the wicked, while the latter, out of a conscience of their guilt, grew by desperation worse than they intended to be. That the wise were often imposed upon by men of small understandings. That the innocent were possessed with laziness, and slept in the most visible article of danger, and that the ill-disposed, though of the most different opinions, opposite interests, and distant affections, united in a firm and constant league of mischief, while those whose opinions and interests were the same, divided into factions and emulations more pernicious to the public than the treasons of others. Meanwhile the community, under pretence of zeal for religion, law, liberty, and parliament, (words of precious esteem in their just signification,) were furiously hurried into actions introducing atheism, and dissolving all the elements of the Christian religion."