Let me mediate here between Baxter and the Bishops:  Baxter had taken for granted that the King had a right to promise a revision of the Liturgy, Canons and regiment of the Church, and that the Bishops ought to have met him and his friends as diplomatists on even ground.  The Bishops could not with discretion openly avow all they meant; and it would be bigotry to deny that the spirit of compromise had no indwelling in their feelings or intents.  But nevertheless it is true that they thought more in the spirit of the English Constitution than Baxter and his friends.—­“This,” thought they, “is the law of the land, ’quam nolumus mutari’; and it must be the King with and by the advice of his Parliament, that can authorize any part of his subjects to take the question of its repeal into consideration.  Under other circumstances a King might bring the Bishops and the Heads of the Romish party together to plot against the law of the land.  No! we would have no other secret Committees but of Parliamentary appointment.  We are but so many individuals.  It is in the Legislature that the congregations, the party most interested in this cause, meet collectively by their representatives.”—­Lastly, let it not be overlooked, that the root of the bitterness was common to both parties,—­namely, the conviction of the vital importance of uniformity;—­and this admitted, surely an undoubted majority in favor of what is already law must decide whose uniformity it is to be.

Ib. p. 368.

We must needs believe that when your Majesty took our consent to a Liturgy to be a foundation that would infer our concord, you meant not that we should have no concord but by consenting to this Liturgy without any considerable alteration.

This is forcible reasoning, but which the Bishops could fairly leave for the King to answer;—­the contract tacit or expressed, being between him and the anti-Prelatic Presbytero-Episcopalian party, to which neither the Bishops nor the Legislature had acceded or assented.  If Baxter and Calamy were so little imbued with the spirit of the Constitution as to consider Charles II. as the breath of their nostrils, and this dread sovereign Breath in its passage gave a snort or a snuffle, or having led them to expect a snuffle surprised them with a snort, let the reproach be shared between the Breath’s fetid conscience and the nostrils’ nasoductility.  The traitors to the liberty of their country who were swarming and intriguing for favor at Breda when they should have been at their post in Parliament or in the Lobby preparing terms and conditions!—­Had all the ministers that were afterwards ejected and the Presbyterian party generally exerted themselves, heart and soul, with Monk’s soldiers, and in collecting those whom Monk had displaced, and, instead of carrying on treasons against the Government ‘de facto’ by mendicant negociations with Charles, had taken open measures to confer the sceptre on him as the Scotch did,—­whose stern and truly loyal conduct has been most unjustly condemned,—­the schism in the Church might have been prevented and the Revolution of 1688 superseded.