e
ox, would help to drag the new ark into the sanctuary. For this purpose,
he carefully concealed from Jobson the latent privileges and immunities
that were vested in these cabalistical words, nor did he think it any
infringement of his principles to inforce by his own behaviour the
abominable doctrine of passive obedience, and to insist that Jobson
should either become a covenanter, or quit his service, and forfeit his
wages. Jobson had once heard the _rigmarole_, as he called it, read
over, and by a strange perverseness of understanding, fancied these
indentures of faith and unity, to be no other than binding himself to
the Devil, to pull down the church and curse the King, and he preferred
persecution and poverty to such servitude. As he resisted all Davies's
attempts to enlighten him, and met his master's threats with a
stedfastness which these friends to liberty called contumacy, the
alternative was dismissal from his present service, without any
remuneration for his past.

He applied to Justice Morgan for redress, who, anxious to disprove the
suspicions that were circulated of his disposition to favour
disorganizing principles, enjoined Jobson to obey his master, and
reproved him for thinking that his soul could be endangered by following
the example of so many great men, who had taken the covenant. It
inopportunely happened, that at this moment Jobson recollected a sermon
of Dr. Beaumont's, against the sin of following a multitude to do evil,
in which every man's responsibility for his own offences, and the
attention of Omniscience to individual transgressions, were illustrated
by proofs drawn from the minute watchfulness of Providence, which
superintends the heedless flight of the sparrow, and adorns the lilies
of the field with more than regal magnificence. In reply to Morgan's
enumeration of the Dukes, Marquisses, Lords and Squires, Godly Ministers
and staunch Common-wealth men, who had taken the covenant, Jobson shook
his head, and said, none of them would answer for his soul. "I heard,"
said he, "last Sunday in church, that all the Princes of a great nation
worshipped a golden image, and three men would not, so every body went
against these men, and threw them into a burning furnace. But the men
were right after all in the end of the story; and so, please Your
Worship, I'll not sign the Devil's bond for any body."

Davies, who was present at the examination, now remarked that Jobson had
not only forfeited