54 
JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
mocked with hollow promises of relief, now favoured by a 
temporary indulgence, and then visited anew with redoubled 
persecution, their whole life hung in suspense on the capricious 
humour and on the result of the conflicting purposes of the court 
and the parliament. . . . Persecution and indulgence, indulgence 
and persecution, in ceaseless alternation, make up the entire 
history of the time. Yet a sense of religious duty withheld the 
Puritan ministers from laying aside their pastoral functions. The 
strength of a solemn vow still bound them to their flocks. So 
long as the penal laws were in force they preached to their people 
in private, and visited them by stealth ; while their retreats were 
hunted out by informers of the most infamous character, their 
places of meeting broken in upon by a licentious soldiery, and 
learned and holy men, dragged to the bar of justice for simply 
preaching the gospel, were insulted by magistrates, brow-beaten 
by judges, and laid up in fetid and unwholesome gaols — at that 
time nurseries of pestilence, and destitute of every Christian comfort 
and decency — among highwaymen and murder ers."* 
I hold the religious persecutions under his most religious and 
gracious majesty Charles II. — that merrily despicable monarch — 
to be the worst this kingdom has known. Mary was a consistent, 
conscientious bigot, a devoted daughter of her Church, who be- 
lieved it better a few should burn here than many hereafter. And 
after all, burning is so far merciful that it is quickly over. 
But Charles was a faithless, heartless, conscienceless debauchee, 
whose persecutions had no higher motive than the revenge of a 
mean coward spirit, without the warrant of conviction, without 
the excuse of policy. James, like Mary, was consistent, and had 
a policy — the policy of the re-establishment of his faith. Eut if 
the men differed, their acts did not. Eoth played with their 
victims before they killed them; and under their Christian rule 
thousands of men and women, driven from house and home, for- 
bidden all means of livelihood, whipped here and imprisoned there, 
pilloried, branded, and cropped, suffered tortures to which the fires 
of Smithfield would have been a crowning mercy. 
And the second Charles among his other virtues counts that 
blackest sin of ingratitude. It was to the Presbyterians, quite 
as much as to Monk, that he owed his recal from exile. This 
was recognized in his declaration at Ereda : " We do declare a 
* Tayler's " Retrospect of the Religious Life of England," pp. 250, 251. 
