this perception of its uses as a vast administrative and educational establishment we will not say. Mr. Thackeray, indeed, openly avows his opinion that Swift had no belief in the Christian religion. "Swift's," he says, "was a reverent, was a pious spirit--he could love and could pray;" but such religion as he had, Mr. Thackeray hints, was a kind of mad, despairing Deism, and had nothing of Christianity in it. Hence, "having put that cassock on, it poisoned him; he was strangled in his bands." The question thus broached as to the nature of Swift's religion is too deep to be discussed here. Though we would not exactly say, with Mr. Thackeray, that Swift's was a "reverent" and "pious" spirit, there are, as he phrases it, breakings out of "the stars of religion and love" shining in the serene blue through "the driving clouds and the maddened hurricane of Swift's life;" and this, though vague, is about all that we have warrant for saying. As to the zeal of his Churchmanship, however, there is no doubt at all. There was not a man in the British realms more pugnacious in the interests of his order, more resolute in defending the prerogatives of the Church of England against Dissenters and others desirous of limiting them, or more anxious to elevate the social position and intellectual character of the clergy, than the author of the _Tale of a Tub_. No veteran commander of a regiment could have had more of the military than the parson of Laracor had of the ecclesiastical _esprit de corps_; and, indeed, Swift's known dislike to the military may be best explained as the natural jealousy of the surplice at the larger consideration accorded by society to the scarlet coat. Almost all Swift's writings between 1702 and 1710 are assertions of his High-Church sentiments and vindications of the Establishment against its assailants. Thus in 1708 came forth his _Letter on the Sacramental Test_, a hot High-Church and anti-Dissenter pamphlet; and this was followed in the same year by his _Sentiments of a Church of England man with respect to Religion and Government_, and by his ironical argument, aimed at free-thinkers and latitudinarians, entitled _Reasons against Abolishing Christianity_. In 1709 he published a graver pamphlet, under the name of _A Project for the Advancement of Religion_, in which he urged certain measures for the reform of public morals and the strengthening of the Establishment, recommending in particular a scheme of Church-extension. Thus, with all his readiness to help the Whigs politically, Swift was certainly faithful to his High-Church principles. But, as we have said, a High-Church Whig was an anomaly which the Whigs refused to comprehend. Latitudinarians, Low Churchmen, and Dissenters, did not know what to make of a Whiggism in state-politics which was conjoined with the strongest form of ecclesiastical Toryism. Hence, in spite of his ability, Swift was not a man that the Whigs could patronise and prefer.