Books Condemned to be Burnt Part 6

[122:1] In Kennet's _Register_, 189.

[122:2] Lamont's _Diary_, 159.

[127:1] Scobell's _Collection of Acts_, II. 8.

CHAPTER VI.

BOOK-FIRES OF THE REVOLUTION.

The period of the Revolution, by which I mean from the accession of William III. to the death of Queen Anne, was a time in which the conflict between Orthodoxy and Free Thought, and again between Church and Dissent, continued with an unabated ferocity, which is most clearly reflected in and ill.u.s.trated by the sensational history of its contemporary literature, especially during the reign of Queen Anne. I am not aware that any book was burnt by authority of the English Parliament during the reign of William, but to say this in the face of Molyneux's _Case for Ireland_, which has been so frequently by great authorities declared to have been so treated, compels me to allude to the history of that book, and to give the reasons for a contrary belief.

It is first stated in the preface to the edition of 1770 that William Molyneux's _Case for Ireland being bound by Acts of Parliament in England_, first published in 1698, was burnt by the hangman at the order of Parliament; and the statement has been often repeated by later writers, as by Mr. Lecky, Dr. Ball, and others. Why then is there no mention of such a sentence in the Journals of the Commons, where a full account is given of the proceedings against the book; nor in Swift's _Drapier Letters_, where he refers to the fate of the _Case for Ireland_? This seems almost conclusive evidence on the negative side; but as the editor of 1770 may have had some lost authority for his remark, and not been merely mistaken, some account may be given of the book, as of one possibly, but not probably, condemned to the flames.[137:1]

Molyneux was distinguished for his scientific attainments, was a member of the Irish Parliament, first for Dublin City and then for the University, and was also a great friend of Locke the philosopher. The introduction in 1698 of the Bill, which was carried the same year by the English Parliament, forbidding the exportation of Irish woollen manufactures to England or elsewhere--one of the worst Acts of oppression of the many that England has perpetrated against Ireland--led Molyneux to write this book, in which he contends for the const.i.tutional right of Ireland to absolute legislative independence. As the political relationship between the two countries--a relation now of pure force on one side, and of subjection on the other--is still a matter of contention, it will not be out of place to devote a few lines to a brief summary of his argument.

Before 1641 no law made in England was of force in Ireland without the consent of the latter, a large number of English Acts not being received in Ireland till they had been separately enacted there also. At the so-called conquest of Ireland by Henry II., the English laws settled by him were voluntarily accepted by the Irish clergy and n.o.bility, and Ireland was allowed the freedom of holding parliaments as a separate and distinct kingdom from England. So it was that John was made King (or Dominus) of Ireland even in the lifetime of his father, Henry II., and remained so during the reign of his brother, Richard I. Ireland, therefore, could not be bound by England without the consent of her own representatives; and the happiness of having her representatives in the English Parliament could hardly be hoped for, since that experiment had been proved in Cromwell's time to be too troublesome and inconvenient.

Molyneux concluded his argument with a warning that subsequent history has amply justified--"Advancing the power of the Parliament of England by breaking the rights of another may in time have ill effects." So, indeed, it has; but such warnings or prophecies seldom bring favour to their authors, and the English Parliament was moved to fury by Molyneux' arguments. Yet the latter, writing to Locke on the subject of his book, had said: "I think I have treated it with that caution and submission that it cannot justly give any offence; insomuch that I scruple not to put my name to it; and, by the advice of some good friends, have presumed to dedicate it to his Majesty. . . . But till I either see how the Parliament at Westminster is pleased to take it, or till I see them risen, I do not think it advisable for me to go on t'other side of the water. Though I am not apprehensive of any mischief from them, yet G.o.d only knows what resentments captious men may take on such occasions." (April 19th, 1698.)

Molyneux, however, was soon to know this himself, for on May 21st his book was submitted to the examination of a committee; and on the committee's report (June 22nd) that it was "of dangerous consequence to the Crown and people of England, by denying the authority of the King and Parliament of England to bind the kingdom and people of Ireland," an address was presented to the King praying him to punish the author of such "bold and pernicious a.s.sertions," and to discourage all things that might lessen the dependence of Ireland upon England; to which William replied that he would take care that what they complained of should be prevented and redressed. Perhaps the dedication of the book to the King restrained the House from voting it to the flames; but, anyhow, there is not the least contemporary evidence of their doing so. Molyneux did not survive the year of the condemnation of his book; but, in spite of his fears, he spent five weeks with Locke at Oates in the autumn of the same year, his book surviving him, to attest his wonderful foresight as much as later events justified his spirited remonstrance.

There is, however, no doubt about the burning of a book for its theological sentiments at this time, though it was no Parliament but only an university which committed it to the fire. Oxford University has always tempered her love for learning with a dislike for inquiry, and set the cause of orthodoxy above the cause of truth. This phase of her character was never better ill.u.s.trated than in the case of _The Naked Gospel_, by the Rev.

Arthur Bury, Rector of Exeter College (1690).

A high value attaches to the first edition of this book, wherein the author essayed to show what the primitive Gospel really was, what alterations had been gradually made in it, and what advantages and disadvantages had therefrom ensued. Bury, many years before, in 1648, had known what it was to be led from his college by a file of musketeers, and forbidden to return to Oxford or his fellowship under pain of death, because he had the courage in those days to read the prayers of the Church. So he had some justification for ascribing his anonymous work to "a true son of the Church"; and his motive was the promotion of that charity and toleration which breathes in its every page. The King had summoned a Convocation, to make certain changes in the Litany, and, if possible, to reconcile ecclesiastical differences; he even dreamt of uniting the Protestant Churches of England and of the Continent, and his Comprehension Bill, had it pa.s.sed Parliament, might have made the English Church a really national Church; and it was from his sympathy with the broad ideas of the King that Bury wrote his pamphlet, intending not to publish it, but to present it to the members of Convocation severally. Unfortunately he showed or presented a few copies to a few friends, with the natural result that the work became known, the author admonished for heresy and driven from his rectorship, and the book publicly burnt, by a vote of the university, in the area of the schools (August 19th, 1690). He should have reflected that it is as little the part of a discreet man to try to reconcile religious factions as to seek to separate fighting tigers.

The unexpected commotion roused by his book led the author to republish it with great modifications and omissions; a fact which much diminishes the interest of the second edition of 1691. For instance, the preface to the second edition omits this pa.s.sage of the first: "The Church of England, as it needs not, so it does not, forbid any of its sons the use of their own eyes; if it did, this alone would be sufficient reason not only to distrust but to condemn it." Nevertheless both editions alike contain many pa.s.sages remarkable for their breadth of view no less than for their admirable expression. What, for instance, could be better than the pa.s.sage wherein he speaks of the priests cramming the people with doctrines, "so many in numbers that an ordinary mind cannot retain them; so perplexed in matter that the best understanding cannot comprehend them; so impertinent to any good purpose that a good man need not regard them; and so unmentioned in Scripture that none but the greatest subtlety can therein discover the least intimations of them"? Or again: "No king is more independent in his own dominions from any foreign jurisdiction in matters civil, than every Christian is within his own mind in matters of faith"? What Doctor of Divinity of these days would speak as courageously as this one did two hundred years ago? So let any one be prepared to give a good price for a first edition copy of _The Naked Gospel_, and, when obtained, to study as well as honour it.

History is apt to repeat itself, and therefore it is of interest to note here that about a century and a half later (March 1849) Exeter College was again stirred to the burning point, and that in connection with a book which, apart from its intrinsic interest, enjoys the distinction of having been actually the last to be burnt in England. In the _Morning Post_ of March 9th, 1849, it is written: "We are informed that a work recently published by Mr. Froude, M.A., Fellow of Exeter College, ent.i.tled the _Nemesis of Faith_, was a few days since publicly burned by the authorities in the College Hall." The _Nemesis_, therefore, deserves a place in our libraries, and many will even prize it above its author's historical works, as the last example of the effort of the ecclesiastical spirit to crush the discussion of its dogmas. It is owing to this attempt that the _Nemesis_ is now so well known as to render any reference to its contents superfluous.

We now pa.s.s to the reign of Queen Anne, when Toryism became the prevalent power in the country, and manifested its peculiar spirit by the increased persecution of literature.

Among strictly theological works one by John Asgill, barrister, claims a peculiar distinction, for it was burnt by order of two Parliaments, English and Irish, and its author expelled from two Houses of Commons. This was the famous _Argument Proving that According to the Covenant of Eternal Life, revealed in the Scriptures, Man may be Translated from Hence into that Eternal Life without Pa.s.sing Through Death, although the Human Nature of Christ Himself could not be thus Translated till He had Pa.s.sed Through Death_ (1700). In this book of 106 pages Asgill argued that death, which had come by Adam, had been removed by the death of Christ, and had lost its legal power. He claimed the right, and a.s.serted his expectation, of actual translation; and so went by the nickname of "Translated Asgill." He tells how in writing it he felt two powers within him, one bidding him write, the other bobbing his elbow; but unfortunately the former prevailed, as it generally does. His printer told him that his men thought the author a little crazed, in which Asgill fancied the printer spoke one word for them and two for himself. Other people agreed with the printer, to Asgill's advantage, for, as he says, "Coming into court to see me as a monster, and hearing me talk like a man, I soon fell into my share of practice": which I mention as a hint for the briefless. This was in Ireland, where Asgill was elected member for Enniscorthy, for which place however he only sat four days, being expelled for his pamphlet on October 10th, 1703. Shortly afterwards Asgill became member for Bramber, in Suss.e.x, but this seat, too, he lost in 1707 for the same reason, the English House, like the Irish, though not by a unanimous vote, condemning his book to the flames. Asgill's debts caused him apparently to spend the rest of his days in the comparative peace of the Fleet prison.

Coleridge says there is no genuine Saxon English better than Asgill's, and that his irony is often finer than Swift's. At all events, his burnt work--the labour of seven years--is very dreary reading, relieved however by such occasional good sayings as "It is much easier to make a creed than to believe it after it is made," or "Custom itself, without a reason for it, is an argument only for fools." Asgill's defence before the House of Commons shows that a very strained interpretation was placed upon the pa.s.sages that gave offence. Let it suffice to quote one: "Stare at me as long as you will, I am sure that neither my physiognomy, sins, nor misfortune can make me so unlikely to be translated as my Redeemer was to be hanged." Asgill clearly wrote in all honesty and sincerity, though the contrary has been suggested; and his defence was not without spirit or point: "Pray what is this blasphemous crime I here stand charged with? A belief of what we all profess, or at least of what no one can deny. If the death of the body be included in the fall, why is not this life of the body included in the redemption? And if I have a firmer belief in this than another, am I therefore a blasphemer?" But the House thought that he was; and to impugn the right of the majority to decide such a point would be to impugn a fundamental principle of the British Const.i.tution. I therefore refrain from an opinion, and leave the matter to the reader's judgment.

Among the many books that have owed an increase of popularity, or any popularity at all, to the fire that burnt them, may be instanced the two works of Dr. Coward, which were burnt by order of the House of Commons in Palace Yard on March 18th, 1704. Dr.

Coward had been a Fellow of Merton, and he wrote poetry as well as books of medicine, but in 1702 he ventured on metaphysical ground, and under the pseudonym of "Estibius Psychalethes"

dedicated to the clergy his _Second Thoughts concerning the Human Soul_, in which he contended that the notion of the soul as a separate immaterial substance was "a plain heathenist invention:" not exactly a position the clergy were likely to welcome, although the author repeatedly avowed his belief in an eternal future life. In 1704 the Doctor published his _Grand Essay: a Vindication of Reason and Religion against the Impostures of Philosophy_, in which he repeated his ideas about immaterial substances, and argued that matter and motion were the foundation of thought in man and brutes. The House of Commons called him to its bar, and burnt his books; a proceeding which conferred such additional popularity upon them that the Doctor was enabled the very same year to bring out a second edition of his _Second Thoughts_. Certainly no other treatment could have made the books popular. They are perfectly legitimate, but rather dry, metaphysical disquisitions; and Parliament might quite as fairly have burnt Locke's famous essay on the _Human Understanding_.

For Parliament thus to const.i.tute itself Defender of the Faith was not merely to trespa.s.s on the office of the Crown, but to sin against the more sacred right of common sense itself. We cannot be surprised, therefore, since the English Parliament sinned in this way (as it does to this day in a minor degree), that the Irish Parliament should have sinned equally, as it did about the same time, in the case of a book whose t.i.tle far more suggested heresy than its contents substantiated it. I refer to Toland's _Christianity not Mysterious_ (1696), which was burnt by the hangman before the Parliament House Gate at Dublin, and in the open street before the Town-House, by order of the Committee of Religion of the Irish House of Commons, one member even going so far as to advocate the burning of Toland himself. It is difficult now to understand the extreme excitement caused by Toland's book, seeing that it was evidently written in the interests of Christianity, and would now be read without emotion by the most orthodox. It was only the superstructure, not the foundation, that Toland attacked; his whole contention being that Christianity, rightly understood, contained nothing mysterious or inconsistent with reason, but that all ideas of this sort, and most of its rites, had been aftergrowths, borrowed from Paganism, in that compromise between the new and old religion which const.i.tuted the world's Christianisation.[150:1] Although this fact is now generally admitted, Toland puts the case so well that it is best to give his own words:--

"The Christians," he says, "were careful to remove all obstacles lying in the way of the Gentiles. They thought the most effectual way of gaining them over to their side was by compounding the matter, which led them to unwarrantable compliances, till at length they likewise set up for mysteries. Yet not having the least precedent for any ceremonies from the Gospel, excepting Baptism and the Supper, they strangely disguised and transformed these by adding to them the pagan mystic rites. They administered them with the strictest secrecy; and to be inferior to their adversaries in no circ.u.mstance, they permitted none to a.s.sist at them but such as were antecedently prepared or initiated."

The parallel Toland proceeds to draw is extremely instructive, and could only be improved on in our own day by tracing both Pagan and Christian rites to their antecedent origins in India.

What he says also of the Fathers would be nowadays a.s.sented to by all who have ever had the curiosity to look into their writings; namely, "that they were as injudicious, violent, and factious as other men; that they were, for the greatest part, very credulous and superst.i.tious in religion, as well as pitifully ignorant and superficial in the minutest punctilios of literature."

Toland was only twenty-six when he published his first book, but, to judge from the correspondence between Locke and Molyneux, he was vain and indiscreet. "He has raised against him," says the latter from Dublin (May 27th, 1697), "the clamours of all parties; and this not so much by his difference in opinion as by his unseasonable way of discoursing, propagating, and maintaining it." Again (September 11th, 1697): "Mr. T. is at last driven out of the kingdom; the poor gentleman, by his imprudent management, had raised such an universal outcry that it was even dangerous for a man to have been known once to converse with him. This made all men wary of reputation decline seeing him; insomuch that at last he wanted a meal's meat (as I am told), and none would admit him to their tables. The little stock of money which he brought into the country being exhausted, he fell to borrowing from any one that would lend him half-a-crown, and ran in debt for his wigs, clothes, and lodging." Then when the Parliament ordered him to be taken into custody, and to be prosecuted, he very wisely fled the country, suffering only a temporary rebuff, and writing many other books, political and religious, none of which ever attained the distinction of his first.

But it was in the struggle between the Church and Dissent that the party-spirit of Queen Anne's reign chiefly manifested itself in the burning of books. No one fought for the cause of Dissent with greater energy or greater personal loss than the famous Defoe, the author of _Robinson Crusoe_. It brought him to ruin, and one of his books to the hangman.

It would seem that his _Shortest Way with the Dissenters_ (1702), which ironically advocated their extermination, was in answer to a sermon preached at Oxford by Sacheverell in June of the same year, called _The Political Union_, wherein he alluded to a party against whom all friends of the Anglican Church "ought to hang out the b.l.o.o.d.y flag and banner of defiance." Defoe's pamphlet so exactly accorded with the sentiments of the High Church party against the Dissenters that the extent of their applause at first was only equalled by that of their subsequent fury when the true author and his true object came to be known. Parliament ordered the work to be burnt by the hangman, and Defoe was soon afterwards sentenced to a ruinous fine and imprisonment, and to three days' punishment in the pillory. It was on this occasion that he wrote his famous _Hymn to the Pillory_, which he distributed among the spectators, and from which (as it is somewhat long) I quote a few of the more striking lines:--

"Hail, Hieroglyphick State machine, Contrived to punish fancy in; Men that are men in thee can feel no pain, And all thy insignificants disdain.

Here by the errors of the town The fools look out and knaves look on.

Actions receive their tincture from the times, And, as they change, are virtues made or crimes.

Thou art the State-trap of the Law, But neither can keep knaves nor honest men in awe.

Thou art no shame to Truth and Honesty, Nor is the character of such defaced by thee, Who suffer by oppression's injury.

Shame, like the exhalations of the Sun, Falls back where first the motion was begun, And they who for no crime shall on thy brows appear, Bear less reproach than they who placed them there."

The State-trap of the Law, however, long survived Defoe's hymn to it, and was unworthily employed against many another great Englishman before its abolition. That event was delayed till the first year of Queen Victoria's reign; the House of Lords defending it, as it defended all other abuses of our old penal code, when the Commons in 1815 pa.s.sed a Bill for its abolition.

About the same time, Parliament ordered to be burnt by the hangman a pamphlet against the Test, which one John Humphrey, an aged Nonconformist minister, had written and circulated among the members of Parliament.[154:1] There seems to be no record of the pamphlet's name; and I only guess it may be a work ent.i.tled, _A Draught for a National Church accommodation, whereby the subjects of North and South Britain, however different in their judgments concerning Episcopacy and Presbytery, may yet be united_ (1709).

For, to suggest union or compromise or reconciliation between parties is generally to court persecution from both.

A book that was very famous in its day, on the opposite side to Defoe, was Doctor Drake's _Memorial of the Church of England_, published anonymously in 1705. The Tory author was indignant that the House of Lords should have rejected the Bill against Occasional Conformity, which would have made it impossible for Dissenters to hold any office by conforming to the Test Act; he complained of the knavish pains of the Dissenters to divide Churchmen into High and Low; and he declared that the present prospect of the Church was "very melancholy," and that of the government "not much more comfortable." Long habit has rendered us callous to the melancholy state of the Church and the discomfort of governments; but in Queen Anne's time the croakers'

favourite cry was a serious offence. The Queen's Speech, therefore, of October 27th, 1705, expressed strong resentment at this representation of the Church in danger; both Houses, by considerable majorities, voted the Church to be "in a most safe and flourishing condition"; and a royal proclamation censured both the book and its unknown author, a few months after it had been presented by the Grand Jury of the City, and publicly burnt by the hangman. It was more rationally and effectually dealt with in Defoe's _High Church Legion, or the Memorial examined_; but one is sometimes tempted to wish that the cry of the Church in danger might be as summarily disposed of as it was in the reign of Queen Anne, when to vote its safety was deemed sufficient to insure it.

Drake's misfortunes as a writer were as conspicuous as his abilities. Two years before the Memorial was burnt, his _Historia Anglo-Scotica_, purporting to give an impartial history of the events that occurred between England and Scotland from William the Conqueror to Queen Elizabeth, was burnt at Edinburgh (June 30th, 1703). It was dedicated to Sir Edward Seymour, one of the Queen's Commissioners for the Union, and a High Churchman; and as it also expressed the hope that the Union would afford the Scotch "as ample a field to love and admire the generosity of the English as they had theretofore to dread their valour," it was clearly not calculated to please the Scotch. They accordingly burned it for its many reflections on the sovereignty and independence of their crown and nation. As the Memorial was also burnt at Dublin, Drake enjoys the distinction of having contributed a book to be burnt in each of the three kingdoms. He would, perhaps, have done better to have stuck to medicine; and indeed the number of books written by doctors, which have brought their authors into trouble, is a remarkable fact in the history of literature.

Next to Drake's Memorial, and closely akin to it in argument, come the two famous sermons of Dr. Sacheverell, the friend of Addison; sermons which made a greater stir in the reign of Queen Anne than any sermons have ever since made, or seem ever likely to make again. They were preached in August and November 1709, the first at Derby, called the _Communication of Sin_, and the other at St. Paul's. The latter, _Perils among False Brethren_, is very vigorous, even to read, and it is easy to understand the commotion it caused. The False Brethren are the Dissenters and Republicans; Sacheverell is as indignant with those "upstart novelists" who presume "to evacuate the grand sanction of the Gospel, the eternity of h.e.l.l torments," as with those false brethren who "will renounce their creed and read the Decalogue backward . . . fall down and worship the very Devil himself for the riches and honour of this world." In his advocacy of non-resistance he was thought to hit at the Glorious Revolution itself. "The grand security of our government, and the very pillar upon which it stands, is founded upon the steady belief of the subject's obligation to an absolute and unconditional obedience to the supreme power in all things lawful, and the utter illegality of any resistance upon any pretence whatsoever."

Then came the great trial in the House of Lords, and Sacheverell's most able defence, often attributed to his friend Atterbury. This speech, which Boyer calls "studied, artful, and pathetic," deeply affected the fair s.e.x, and even drew tears from some of the tender-hearted; but a certain lady to whom, before he preached the sermon, Sacheverell had explained the allusions in it to William III., the Ministry, and Lord G.o.dolphin, was so astonished at the audacity of his public recantation that she suddenly cried out, "The greatest villain under the sun!" But for this little fact, one might think Sacheverell was unfairly treated. At the end of it all, however, he was only suspended from preaching for three years, and his sermons condemned to be burnt before the Royal Exchange in presence of the Lord Mayor and sheriffs; a sentence so much more lenient than at first seemed probable, that bonfires and illuminations in London and Westminster attested the general delight. At the instance, too, of Sacheverell's friends, certain other books were burnt two days before his own, by order of the House of Commons: so that the High Church party had not altogether the worst of the battle. The books so burnt were the following:--1. _The Rights of the Christian Church a.s.serted against the Romish and all other Priests._ By M. Tindal. 2. _A Defence of the Rights of the Christian Church._ 3. _A Letter from a Country Attorney to a Country Parson concerning the Rights of the Church._ 4. Le Clerc's extract and judgment of the same. 5. John Clendon's _Tractatus Philosophico-Theologicus de Persona_: a book that dealt with the subject of the Trinity.

Boyer gives a curious description of Sacheverell: "A man of large and strong make and good symmetry of parts; of a livid complexion and audacious look, without sprightliness; the result and indication of an envious, ill-natured, proud, sullen, and ambitious spirit"--clearly not the portrait of a friend. Lord Campbell thought the St. Paul sermon contemptible, and General Stanhope, in the debate, called it nonsensical and incoherent. It seems to me the very reverse, even if we abstract it from its stupendous effect. Sacheverell, no doubt, was a more than usually narrow-minded priest; but in judging of the preacher we must think also of the look and the voice and the gestures, and these probably fully made up, as they so often do, for anything false or illogical in the sermon itself.

At all events, Sacheverell won for himself a place in English history. That he should have brought the House of Lords into conflict with the Church, causing it to condemn to the flames, together with his own sermons, the famous Oxford decree of 1683, which a.s.serted the most absolute claims of monarchy, condemned twenty-seven propositions as impious and seditious, and most of them as heretical and blasphemous, and condemned the works of nineteen writers to the flames, would alone ent.i.tle his name to remembrance.[160:1] So incensed indeed were the Commons, that they also condemned to be burnt the very _Collections of Pa.s.sages referred to by Dr. Sacheverell in the Answer to the Articles of his Impeachment_.

But Parliament was in a burning mood; for Sacheverell's friends, wishing to justify his cry of the Church in danger, which he had ascribed to the heretical works lately printed, easily succeeded in procuring the burning of Tindal's and Clendon's books, before mentioned. Nor can any one who reads that immortal work, _The Rights of the Christian Church, a.s.serted against the Romish and all other Priests who claim an independent power over it_, wonder at their so urging the House, however much he may wonder at their succeeding.

The first edition of _The Rights of the Christian Church_ appeared in 1706, published anonymously, but written by the celebrated Matthew Tindal, than whom All Souls' College has never had a more distinguished Fellow, nor produced a more brilliant writer. In those days, when the question that most agitated men's minds was whether the English Church was of Divine Right, and so independent of the civil power, or whether it was the creature of, and therefore subject to, the law, no work more convincingly proved the latter than this work of Tindal; a work which, even now, ought to be far more generally known than it is, no less for its great historical learning than for its scathing denunciations of priestcraft.

As the subordination of the Church to the State is now a principle of general acceptance, there is less need to give a summary of Tindal's arguments, than to quote some of the pa.s.sages which led the writer to predict, when composing it, that he was writing a book that would drive the clergy mad. The promoting the independent power of the clergy has, he says, "done more mischief to human societies than all the gross superst.i.tions of the heathen, who were nowhere ever so stupid as to entertain such a monstrous contradiction as two independent powers in the same society; and, consequently, their priests were not capable of doing so much mischief to the Commonwealth as some since have been." The fact, that in heathen times greater differences in religion never gave rise to such desolating feuds as had always rent Christendom, proves that "the best religion has had the misfortune to have the worst priests." "'Tis an amazing thing to consider that, though Christ and His Apostles inculcated nothing so much as universal charity, and enjoined their disciples to treat, not only one another, notwithstanding their differences, but even Jews and Gentiles, with all the kindness imaginable, yet that their pretended successors should make it their business to teach such doctrines as destroy all love and friendship among people of different persuasions; and that with so good success that never did mortals hate, abhor, and d.a.m.n one another more heartily, or are readier to do one another more mischief, than the different sects of Christians." "If in the time of that wise heathen Ammia.n.u.s Marcellinus, the Christians bore such hatred to one another that, as he complains, no beasts were such deadly enemies to men as the more savage Christians were generally to one another, what would he, if now alive, say of them?" etc. "The custom of sacrificing men among the heathens was owing to their priests, especially the Druids. . . . And the sacrificing of Christians upon account of their religious tenets (for which millions have suffered) was introduced for no other reason than that the clergy, who took upon them to be the sole judges of religion, might, without control, impose what selfish doctrines they pleased." Of the High Church clergy he wittily observes: "Some say that their lives might serve for a very good rule, if men would act quite contrary to them; for then there is no Christian virtue which they could fail of observing."

If Tindal wished to madden the clergy, he certainly succeeded, for the pulpits raged and thundered against his book. But the only sermon to which he responded was Dr. Wotton's printed Visitation sermon preached before the Bishop of Lincoln; and his _Defence of the Rights of the Christian Church_ (55 pages) was burnt in company with the larger work. It contained the "Letter from a Country Attorney to a Country Parson concerning the Rights of the Church," and the philosopher Le Clerc's appreciative reference to Tindal's work in his _Bibliotheque Choisie_.