the best cause cannot excuse, and commits an act, not only of private treachery, but of distinct military desertion.  To his conduct at the crisis of the fate of James, no service in modern times has, as far as we remember, furnished any parallel.  The conduct of Ney, scandalous enough no doubt, is the very fastidiousness of honour in comparison of it.  The perfidy of Arnold approaches it most nearly.  In our age and country no talents, no services, no party attachments, could bear any man up under such mountains of infamy.  Yet, even before Churchill had performed those great actions which in some degree redeem his character with posterity, the load lay very lightly on him.  He had others in abundance to keep him in countenance.  Godolphin, Orford, Danby, the trimmer Halifax, the renegade Sunderland, were all men of the same class.

Where such was the political morality of the noble and the wealthy, it may easily be conceived that those professions which, even in the best times, are peculiarly liable to corruption, were in a frightful state.  Such a bench and such a bar England has never seen.  Jones, Scroggs, Jeffreys, North, Wright, Sawyer, Williams, are to this day the spots and blemishes of our legal chronicles.  Differing in constitution and in situation, whether blustering or cringing, whether persecuting Protestant or Catholics, they were equally unprincipled and inhuman.  The part which the Church played was not equally atrocious; but it must have been exquisitely diverting to a scoffer.  Never were principles so loudly professed, and so shamelessly abandoned.  The Royal prerogative had been magnified to the skies in theological works.  The doctrine of passive obedience had been preached from innumerable pulpits.  The University of Oxford had sentenced the works of the most moderate constitutionalists to the flames.  The accession of a Catholic King, the frightful cruelties committed in the west of England, never shook the steady loyalty of the clergy.  But did they serve the King for nought?  He laid his hand on them, and they cursed him to his face.  He touched the revenue of a college and the liberty of some prelates; and the whole profession set up a yell worthy of Hugh Peters himself.  Oxford sent her plate to an invader with more alacrity than she had shown when Charles the First requested it.  Nothing was said about the wickedness of resistance till resistance had done its work, till the anointed vicegerent of Heaven had been driven away, and till it had become plain that he would never be restored, or would be restored at least under strict limitations.  The clergy went back, it must be owned, to their old theory, as soon as they found that it would do them no harm.