The writings of John Greenleaf Whittier, Volume 6.
John Greenleaf Whittier, Ed.

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[356] of this character, he denies the king any credit for whatever was really beneficent and praiseworthy in his government. He holds up the royal delinquent in only two lights: the one representing him as a tyrant towards his people; the other as the abject slave of foreign priests,—a man at once hateful and ludicrous, of whom it is difficult to speak without an execration or a sneer.

The events which preceded the revolution of 1688; the undisguised adherence of the king to the Church of Rome; the partial toleration of the despised Quakers and Anabaptists; the gradual relaxation of the severity of the penal laws against Papists and Dissenters, preparing the way for the royal proclamation of entire liberty of conscience throughout the British realm, allowing the crop-eared Puritan and the Papist priest to build conventicles and mass houses under the very eaves of the palaces of Oxford and Canterbury; the mining and countermining of Jesuits and prelates, are detailed with impartial minuteness. The secret springs of the great movements of the time are laid bare; the mean and paltry instrumentalities are seen at work in the under world of corruption, prejudice, and falsehood. No one, save a blind, unreasoning partisan of Catholicism or Episcopacy, can contemplate this chapter in English history without a feeling of disgust. However it may have been overruled for good by that Providence which takes the wise in their own craftiness, the revolution of 1688, in itself considered, affords just as little cause for self-congratulation on the part of Protestants as the substitution of the supremacy of