第28章 Letter VIII(2)

His sword would have cut the gordian knot of hereditary right,and they could have submitted with safe consciences to a conqueror.But to give the crown to a prince,though they had put the whole administration into his hands;which,by the way,was high treason,unless the throne was,what they denied it to be,actually vacant:to give the crown,I say,to a prince who would not take it,when it was in his power to take it,without their consent;to settle a new government by agreement and compact,when the glorious opportunity of establishing it by force and conquest had been unhappily lost:these were propositions to which they could not consent.King James had violated the fundamental laws,which he had promised over and over,and sworn to maintain.

He had shown by his first escape,when nothing was more imposed on him than to wait the resolution of a free Parliament,that he would renounce his crown rather than submit to secure effectually the observation of these laws.He had made a second escape,which was voluntary as well as the first,and made on the same principle,against the entreaties of his friends,and the instigations of the same council that had directed his former conduct,and on a letter from the Queen,claiming his promise to do so.Notwithstanding all these reasons,they who maintained the hereditary right of our kings,reduced themselves,and would have reduced their country,to the absurd necessity of altering their constitution,under pretence of preserving it.No king,except a Stuart,was to reign over us:but we might establish a doge,a lord archon,a regent;and thus these warm assertors of monarchy,refusing to be slaves,contended to be republicans.Many more paradoxes of equal extravagance might be cited,which were advanced directly,or which resulted plainly from the arguments employed on one side of the question in those disputes;but the instances I have cited may suffice for our present purpose,and may serve to show,that although difficulties hard to solve in speculation,or to remove in practice,will arise in the pursuit such absurdities as these can suit of the most rational principles,never arise,except from the most irrational,and always must arise from such.

If the persons who maintained this divine,hereditary,indefeasible right of our kings,had thought fit to drop these principles,when they laid aside those of passive obedience and non-resistance,and no tolerable reason can be given why they did not,their conduct would have been consistent and uniform on this great occasion;and this consistency and uniformity would have been productive of great good,by taking away at once even the appearances of all political division in the bulk of the nation.But whilst they laboured to reconcile their present conduct to their ancient system,they were true to neither.They had gone much farther than this would allow,and then they refused to go as far as the other required,in order to be safe,and therefore in order to be justified.They lost every kind of merit:the chimerical merit of adhering to a set of silly principles,the real merit of sacrificing their prejudices to the complete deliverance of their country from the recent danger of popery and arbitrary power.Nay,they did worse,for the mischievous consequences of their conduct were not hurtful to them alone,and at that time alone,but to the public,and even down to these times.They furnished pretence to factions,who kept up a division under the old names,when the differences were really extinguished by the conduct of both parties,because the conduct of both parties was no longer conformable to the principles imputed to them.