cries out, “You are a Jacobite, a friend of France and the Pretender;” because he makes you answerable for the definition he has formed of that term, however different it be from what you understand.  I will therefore give two descriptions of passive obedience; the first as it is falsely charged by the Whigs; the other as it is really professed by the Tories, at least by nineteen in twenty of all I ever conversed with.

Passive Obedience as charged by the Whigs.

The doctrine of passive obedience is to believe that a king, even in a limited monarchy, holding his power only from God, is only answerable to Him.  That such a king is above all law, that the cruellest tyrant must be submitted to in all things; and if his commands be ever so unlawful, you must neither fly nor resist, nor use any other weapons than prayers and tears.  Though he should force your wife or daughter, murder your children before your face, or cut off five hundred heads in a morning for his diversion, you are still to wish him a long prosperous reign, and to be patient under all his cruelties, with the same resignation as under a plague or a famine; because to resist him would be to resist God in the person of His vicegerent.  If a king of England should go through the streets of London, in order to murder every man he met, passive obedience commands them to submit.  All laws made to limit him signify nothing, though passed by his own consent, if he thinks fit to break them.  God will indeed call him to a severe account, but the whole people, united to a man, cannot presume to hold his hands, or offer him the least active disobedience.  The people were certainly created for him, and not he for the people.  His next heir, though worse than what I have described, though a fool or a madman, has a divine undefeasible right to succeed him, which no law can disannul; nay though he should kill his father upon the throne, he is immediately king to all intents and purposes, the possession of the crown wiping off all stains.  But whosoever sits on the throne without this title, though never so peaceably, and by consent of former kings and parliaments, is an usurper, while there is any where in the world another person who hath a nearer hereditary right, and the whole kingdom lies under mortal sin till that heir be restored; because he has a divine title which no human law can defeat.

This and a great deal more hath, in a thousand papers[3] and pamphlets, been laid to that doctrine of passive obedience, which the Whigs are pleased to charge upon us.  This is what they perpetually are instilling into the people to believe, as the undoubted principles by which the present ministry, and a great majority in Parliament, do at this time proceed.  This is what they accuse the clergy of delivering from the pulpits, and of preaching up as doctrines absolutely necessary to salvation.  And whoever affirms in general, that passive obedience is due to the supreme power, he is presently loaden by our candid adversaries with such consequences as these.  Let us therefore see what this doctrine is, when stripped of such misrepresentations, by describing it as really taught and practised by the Tories, and then it will appear what grounds our adversaries have to accuse us upon this article.