pretender? Even let him come that we may see what slavery means, and may inquire how the chains of French galleys hang about us, and how easy wooden shoes are to walk in; for no experience teaches so well as that we buy dearest, and pay for with the most smart.

I think this may pass for a very good reason against the protestant succession; nothing is surer than that the management of King Charles II. and his late brother, were the best ways the nation could ever have taken to bring to pass the happy revolution; yet these afflictions to the island were not joyous, but grievous, for the time they remained, and the poor kingdoms suffered great convulsions; but what weighs that if these convulsions are found to be necessary to a cure? If the physicians prescribe a vomit for the cure of any particular distemper, will the patient complain of being made sick? No, no; when you begin to be sick, then we say, Oh, that is right, and then the vomit begins to work; and how shall the island of Britain spew out all the dregs and filth the public digesture has contracted, if it be not made sick with some French physic? If you give good nourishing food upon a foul stomach, you cause that wholesome food to turn into filth, and instead of nourishing the man, it nourishes diseases in the man, till those diseases prove his destruction, and bring him to the grave. In like manner, if you will bring the protestant successor into the government before that government have taken some physic to cleanse it from the ill digesture it may have been under, how do we know but the diseases which are already begun in the constitution may not be nourished and kept up, till they may hereafter break out in the days of our posterity, and prove mortal to the nation. Wherefore should we desire the protestant successor to come in upon a foot of high-flying menage, and be beholden for their establishment to those who are the enemies of the constitution? Would not this be to have in time to come the successors of that house be the same thing as the ages passed have already been made sick of, and made to spew out of the government? Are not any of these considerations enough to make any of us averse to the protestant succession? No, no; let us take a French vomit first, and make us sick, that we may be well, and may afterwards more effectually have our health established.

The pretender will no doubt bring us good medicines, and cure us of all our hypochondriac vapours that now make us so giddy. But, say some, he will bring popery in upon us; popery, say you! alas! it is true, popery is a sad thing, and that, say some folk, ought to have been thought on before now; but suppose then this thing called popery! How will it come in? Why, say the honest folk, the pretender is a papist, and if a popish prince come upon the throne we shall have popery come in upon us without fail. Well, well, and what hurt will this be to you? May not popery be very good in its kind? What if this popery, like the vomit made of poison, be the only physic that can cure you? If this vomit make you spew out your filth, your tory filth, your idolatrous filth, your tyrannic filth, and restore you to your health, shall it not be good for you? Where pray observe in the allegory of physic; you heard before when you take a vomit, the physic given you to vomit is always something contrary to nature, something that if taken in quantity would destroy; but how does it operate? It attacks nature, and puts her upon a ferment to cast out what offends her; but remark it, I pray, when the patient vomits, he always vomits up the physic and the filth together; so, if the nation should take a vomit of popery, as when the pretender comes most certain it is that this will be the consequence, they will vomit up the physic and the filth together; the popery and the pretender will come all up again, and all the popish, arbitrary, tyrannical filth, which has offended the stomach of the nation so long, and ruined its digesture, it will all come up together; one vomit of popery will do us all a great deal of good, for the stomach of the constitution is marvellous foul. Observe, people! this is no new application; the nation has taken a vomit of this kind before now, as in Queen Mary I.'s time; the reformation was not well chewed, and being taken down whole, did not rightly digest, but left too much crudity in the stomach, from whence proceeded ill nourishment, bad blood, and a very ill habit of body in the constitution; witness the distemper which seized the Gospellers in Suffolk, who being struck with an epilepsy or dead palsy in the better half of their understanding, to wit, the religious and zealous part, took up arms for a popish pretender, against the protestant successor, upon the wild-headed whimsey of the right line being jure divino. Well, what followed, I pray? Why, they took a vomit of popery; the potion indeed was given in a double vehicle, viz., of fagots a little inflamed, and this worked so effectually, that the nation having vomited, brought up all the filth of the stomach, and the foolish notion of hereditary right, spewed out popery also along with it. Thus was popery, and fire and fagot, the most effectual remedy to cure the nation of all its simple diseases, and to settle and establish the protestant reformation; and why then should we be so terrified with the apprehensions of popery? Nay, why should we not open our eyes and see how much to our advantage it may be in the next reign to have popery brought in, and to that end the pretender set up, that he may help us to this most useful dose of physic? These are some other of my reasons against the protestant succession; I think they cannot be mended; it may perhaps be thought hard of that we should thus seem to make light of so terrible a thing as popery, and should jest with the affair of the protestants; no, people! no; this is no jest,—taking physic is no jest at all; for it is useful many ways, and there is no keeping the body in health without it; for the corruption of politic constitutions are as gross and as fatal as those of human bodies, and require as immediate application of medicines. And why should you people of this country be so alarmed, and seem so afraid of this thing called popery, when it is spoken of in intelligible terms, since you are not afraid alternately to put your hands to those things which as naturally tend in themselves to bring it upon you, as clouds tend to rain, or smoke to fire; what does all your scandalous divisions, your unchristian quarrellings, your heaping up reproaches, and loading each other with infamy, and with abominable forgeries, what do these tend to but to popery? If it should be asked how have these any such reference? the question is most natural from the premises. If divisions weaken the nation; if whig and tory, even united, are, and have been, weak enough to keep out popery, surely then widening the unnatural breaches, and inflaming things between them to implacable and irreconcileable breaches, must tend to overthrow the protestant kingdom, which, as our ever blessed Saviour said, when divided against itself cannot stand. Besides, are not your breaches come up to that height already as to let any impartial bystander see that popery must be the consequences? Do not one party say openly, they had rather be papists than presbyterians; that they would rather go to mass than to a meeting-house; and are they not to that purpose, all of them who are of that height, openly joined with the jacobites in the cause of popery? On the other hand, are not the presbyterians in Scotland so exasperated at having the abjuration oath imposed upon them, contrary, as they tell us, to their principles, that they care not if he, or any else, would come now and free them from that yoke? What is all this but telling us plainly that the whole nation is running into popery and the pretender? Why then, while you are obliquely, and by consequences, joining your hands to bring in popery, why, O distracted folk! should you think it amiss to have me talk of doing it openly and avowedly? Better is open enmity than