74

HISTORY or ENGLAND.

CHAP.

IV.

1685 .

intermediate sects. The Quakers were also guiltless of alloffence against James and his House. They had not been inexistence as a community till the war between his father andthe Long Parliament was drawing towards a close. They hadbeen cruelly persecuted by some of the revolutionary govern-ments. They had, since the Restoration, in spite of muchill usage, submitted themselves meekly to the royal authority.For they had, though reasoning on premises which theAnglican divines regarded as heterodox, arrived, like theAnglican divines, at the conclusion, that no excess of tyrannyon the part of a prince can justify active resistance on the partof a subject. No libel on the government had ever beentraced to a Quaker.* In no conspiracy against the govern-ment had a Quaker been implicated. The society had notjoined in the clamour for the Exclusion Bill, and had solemnlycondemned the Rye House Plot as a hellish design and a workof the devil.** Indeed, the Friends then took very little partin civil contentions; for they were not, as now, congregatedin large towns, but were generally engaged in agriculture, apursuit from which they have been gradually driven by thevexations consequent on their strange scruple about payingtithe. They were, therefore, far removed from the sconeof political strife. They also, even in domestic privacy,avoided on principle all political conversation. For suchconversation was, in their opinion, unfavourable to theirspirituality of mind, and tended to disturb the austere com-posure of their deportment. The yearly meetings of that agerepeatedly admonished the brethren not to hold discoursetouching affairs of state.*** Even within the memory of per-sons now living those grave elders who retained the habitsof an earlier generation systematically discouraged such

* See the letter to King Charles II. prefixed to Barclay's Apology.

** Sewel's History of the Quakers, hook x.

*** Minutes of Yearly Meetings, 1689, 1090.