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To this effect I must precisely forbid him the fellowship or companie of one sort of people in generall: these are the Jesuites, underminders and inveiglers of greene wits, seducers of men in matter of faith, and subverters of men in matters of State, making of both a bad christian, and worse subject.
Sovereigns will consider those who advise them to place an unlimited confidence in their people as subverters of their thrones, as traitors who aim at their destruction, by leading their easy good-nature, under specious pretences, to admit combinations of bold and faithless men into a participation of their power.
Philosophers in most places are unwelcome: but there is no better reason why Shaftesbury and Hobbes should be excluded from our gallery, than why Epicurus should have been from Cicero's or Zeno from Lucullus's. Of our sovereigns, I think Alfred, Cromwell, and William III alone are eligible; and they, because they opposed successfully the subverters of the laws.
For we have seen how much of our disorders and perplexities is due to the disbelief, among the classes and combinations of men, Barbarian or Philistine, which have hitherto governed our society, in right reason, in a paramount best self; to the inevitable decay and break-up of the organisations by which, asserting and expressing in these organisations their ordinary self only, they have so long ruled us; and to their irresolution, when the society, which their conscience tells them they have made and still manage not with right reason but with their ordinary self, is rudely shaken, in offering resistance to its subverters.
I was at some pains to discover the opinions of these men, and their reasons for entertaining them. They are held in great odium by the generality of the public, and are considered as subverters of all morality whatever.
What then could they be more truly called than "Subverters"? themselves subverted and altogether perverted first, the deceiving spirits secretly deriding and seducing them, wherein themselves delight to jeer at and deceive others.
For by how much the more faithfully the magistrate executeth his office in punishing the wicked, and cherishing and encouraging good men, taking away those things which withstand the gospel, and punishing or driving away the troublers and subverters of the church,—so much the more the orthodox faith and godliness are reverenced and had in estimation,—sins are hated and feared.
Now that the provisions of a divinely appointed Covenant had been indubitably proclaimed; now that the purpose of the Covenant was clearly apprehended and its fundamentals had become immovably established in the hearts of the overwhelming majority of the adherents of the Faith; and now that the first assaults launched by its would-be subverters had been successfully repulsed, the Cause for which that Covenant had been designed could forge ahead along the course traced for it by the finger of its Author.
The successors of Cruni'nus did not inherit his abilities, and the Bulgarians soon sunk into comparative insignificance. In concluding this chapter, it may be proper to give some account of the subverters of the Eastern empire, and of their irruption into Europe. The Arabs, called in the middle ages Saracens, are supposed to be descended from Ishmael, the son of Abraham and Hagar.
This method of gaining the reputation of patriotism, has been unknown till the present age, and reserved for the present leaders of the people, who will have the honour to stand recorded as the original authors of anarchy, the great subverters of order, and the first men who dared to pronounce, that all the secrets of government ought to be made publick.
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