[Footnote 3:  “I observed very well with what insolence and haughtiness some lords of the High-Church party treated, not only their own chaplains, but all other clergy whatsoever, and thought this was sufficiently recompensed by their professions of zeal to the church.”]

But then, if the scribblers on the other side freely speak the sentiments of their party, a divine of the Church of England cannot look for much better quarter thence.  You shall observe nothing more frequent in their weekly papers than a way of affecting to confound the terms of Clergy and High Church, of applying both indifferently, and then loading the latter with all the calumny they can invent.  They will tell you they honour a clergyman; but talk, at the same time, as if there were not three in the kingdom, who could fall in with their definition.[4] After the like manner they insult the universities, as poisoned fountains, and corrupters of youth.

[Footnote 4:  “I had likewise observed how the Whig lords took a direct contrary measure, treated the persons of particular clergymen with great courtesy, but shewed much ill-will and contempt for the order in general.”]

Now, it seems clear to me, that the Whigs might easily have procured and maintained a majority among the clergy, and perhaps in the universities, if they had not too much encouraged or connived at this intemperance of speech and virulence of pen, in the worst and most prostitute of their party; among whom there has been for some years past such a perpetual clamour against the ambition, the implacable temper, and the covetousness of the priesthood:  Such a cant of High Church, and persecution, and being priest-ridden; so many reproaches about narrow principles, or terms of communion:  Then such scandalous reflections on the universities, for infecting the youth of the nation with arbitrary and Jacobite principles, that it was natural for those, who had the care of religion and education, to apprehend some general design of altering the constitution of both.  And all this was the more extraordinary, because it could not easily be forgot, that whatever opposition was made to the usurpations of King James, proceeded altogether from the Church of England, and chiefly from the clergy, and one of the universities.  For, if it were of any use to recall matters of fact, what is more notorious than that prince’s applying himself first to the Church of England?  And upon their refusal to fall in with his measures, making the like advances to the dissenters of all kinds, who readily and almost universally complied with him, affecting in their numerous addresses and pamphlets, the style of Our Brethren the Roman Catholics, whose interests they put on the same foot with their own:  And some of Cromwell’s officers took posts in the army raised against the Prince of Orange.[5] These proceedings of theirs they can only extenuate by urging the provocations they had met from the Church in King Charles’s reign, which though perhaps excusable upon the score of human infirmity, are not by any means a plea of merit equal to the constancy and sufferings of the bishops and clergy, or of the head and fellows of Magdalen College, that furnished the Prince of Orange’s declaration with such powerful arguments to justify and promote the Revolution.