Note 5 — General Introduction.

“The laws against Papists have been extremely severe. New dangers may arise; and if at any time ANOTHER DENOMINATION of men should be equally dangerous to our civil interests, it would be justifiable to lay them under similar restraints.” Page 17.—In another part of this sermon the great men in opposition (some of the first in the kingdom in respect of rank, ability, and virtue) are described as a body of men void of principle, who, without regarding the relation in which they stand to the community, have entered into a league for advancing their private interest, and “who are held together by the same bond that keeps together the lowest and wickedest combinations.”—Was there ever such a censure delivered from a pulpit? What wonder is it that the Dissenters should come in for a share in his Grace’s abuse?—Their political principles, he says, are growing dangerous.—On what does he ground this insinuation? He is mistaken if he imagines that they are all such delinquents as the author of the following tracts, or that they think universally as he does of the war with America. On this subject they are, like other bodies of men in the kingdom, of different opinions.—But I will tell him in what they agree.—They agree in detesting the doctrines of passive obedience and non-resistance. They are all Whigs, enemies to arbitrary power, and firmly attached to those principles of civil and religious liberty which produced the glorious Revolution and the Hanoverian succession.—Such principles are the nation’s best defence; and Protestant Dissenters have hitherto reckoned it their glory to be distinguished by zeal for them, and an adherence to them. Once these principles were approved by men in power. No good can be expected, if they are now reckoned dangerous.