bread in another country, after they had been robbed of all in their own by their king, who had sworn to protect them); from hence, I say, it is plain, that if James could have sat firm upon the throne, his misguided conscience would have induced him to the most inhuman acts of violence. He would have proceeded to the barbarities; and rekindled the flames of Mary. Had he continued to reign over these kingdoms, it is most certain, that instruction and persuasion only would not have been the thing, but where instruction and persuasion failed, imprisonments, tortures, death, would have been used, to compel us to believe all the gross absurdities of Rome, their impieties go God, and contradictions to common sense. We must throw away our reason and our bibles, the noblest gifts of heaven, and neither think nor speak,

but as we are bid by men no wiser than ourselves; or, we must expire under torments as great as the devil and the monks could devise. It was therefore necessary, for the preservation of our church and state, to exclude James and his popish heirs. The common welfare required this salutary precaution. The collected interest of the community is the primary end of every law.
All this, I said, seems quite right. To be sure, during that short twilight of power, which dawned upon popery in England in the years 1689 and 90, its rage was imprudent. It did discover its fury and resentment. In one of the Irish acts you have mentioned, more than 2000 people were attainted, and some of them the most noble and venerable characters in Ireland. Yet had success attended the arms of James, this would have been but the beginning of sorrows. And probably a son of christian Rome would have proscribed more in these two islands, than in heathen Rome, out of the whole vast Roman empire, were given up to destruction for their virtue, by the cruel triumvirate, Augustus, Antony, and Lepidus: And of consequence, since dear experience convinced, it was equally absurd and vain, to imagine that a popish head would govern a protestant church by any councils, but those of popish priests, as it was to imagine that a popish king

would govern a protestant state by any councils, but those of popish counsellors; it must therefore be owned, that the Lords, and others, assembled at Nottingham, were just in declaring, that King James's administrations were usurpations on the constitution; and that they owned it rebellion to resist a king that governed by law; but to resist