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It has been the habit of writers like the present, to conceive that the French Revolution was hailed with general joy by England. Even before the death of the king, the contrary is the fact: the rabble, the factions, and the more bustling and bitter portion of the sectaries, unquestionably exulted in the popular insurrection, and the general weakening of the monarchy.
She had been disavowing acts which the men upon whom she relied in her utmost need had been doing by her authority; she had been affecting to praise their conduct, while she was secretly misrepresenting their actions and maligning their motives, and she had been straining every nerve to make foreign levies, while attempting to amuse the confederates and sectaries with an affectation of clemency.
These sectaries, whose only ground of estrangement from Rome was the question of administering the cup to the laity, and who had never thought of separating themselves from the so-called Apostolical succession of the episcopate in the Catholic Church, Luther then hoped, albeit in vain, to win over to a genuine evangelical belief and practice of religion.
So threatening indeed did the attitude of the Sectaries become that Clarendon was anxious to provide himself with men and money and above all with foreign aid for such a struggle, should it come. Different indeed as were the aims of the king and his Chancellor the course of events drew them inevitably together.
This was the crowd that sat expectant, under the blue sky, in the hot glare of the South, while the doomed captives of Dacia or the sectaries of Judea commended their souls to the gods of the Danube, or the Crucified of Galilee. Half the sand lay in the blinding sun. Half the seats were illuminated by the fierce light.
A strong and useful iron-grey galloway showed, by its sleek and good condition, that the merciful man was merciful to his beast. His accoutrements were in the usual unostentatious but clean and servicable order which characterizes these sectaries.
Only the personal friendship of England's King and the tact and suave sagacity of the Proprietary himself could have procured the signing of this charter, since it was known as it was to all who cared to busy themselves with the matter that here was a Catholic meaning to take other Catholics, together with other scarcely less abominable sectaries, out of the reach of Recusancy Acts and religious pains and penalties, to set them free in England-in-America; and, raising there a state on the novel basis of free religion, perhaps to convert the heathen to all manner of errors, and embark on mischiefs far too large for definition.
Having been chiefly instrumental in Bunyan's first committal to gaol, he doubtless viewed his release with indignation as the leader of the Bedfordshire sectaries who was doing more mischief to the cause of conformity, which it was his province at all hazards to maintain, than any other twenty men. The church would never be safe till he was clapped in prison again.
Our calmer reason will reject such pure and perfect monsters of vice or sanctity, and will impute an equal, or at least an indiscriminate, measure of good and evil to the hostile sectaries, who assumed and bestowed the appellations of orthodox and heretics. They had been educated in the same religion and the same civil society.
The historian of the empire may overlook those disputes which were confined to the obscurity of schools and synods. The Manichæans, who labored to reconcile the religions of Christ and of Zoroaster, had secretly introduced themselves into the provinces: but these foreign sectaries were involved in the common disgrace of the Gnostics, and the Imperial laws were executed by the public hatred.
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