gone, a war is beginning. * * * And if you conquer him, what the
better are you? He will still be King. You can but force him to an
agreement; and how quickly will he have power and advantage to violate
that which he is forced to, and to be avenged on you all for the
displeasure you have done him! He is ignorant of the advantages of a
King that cannot foresee this.

This paragraph goes to make out a case in justification of the Regicides
which Baxter would have found it difficult to answer. Certainly a more
complete exposure of the inconsistency of Baxter's own party cannot be.
For observe, that in case of an agreement with Charles all those
classes, which afterwards formed the main strength of the Parliament and
ultimately decided the contest in its favour, would have been
politically inert, with little influence and no actual power,--I mean
the Yeomanry, and the Citizens of London: while a vast majority of the
Nobles and landed Gentry, who sooner or later must have become the
majority in Parliament, went over to the King at once. Add to these the
whole systematized force of the High Church Clergy and all the rude
ignorant vulgar in high and low life, who detested every attempt at
moral reform,--and it is obvious that the King could not want
opportunities to retract and undo all that he had conceded under
compulsion. But that neither the will was wanting, nor his conscience at
all in the way, his own advocate Clarendon and others have supplied
damning proofs.

Ib. p. 27.

And though Parliaments may draw up Bills for repealing laws, yet hath
the King his negative voice, and without his consent they cannot do
it; which though they acknowledge, yet did they too easily admit of
petitions against the Episcopacy and Liturgy, and connived at all the
clamors and papers which were against them.

How so? If they admitted the King's right to deny, they must admit the
subject's right to entreat.

Ib.

Had they endeavoured the ejection of lay-chancellors, and the reducing
of the dioceses to a narrower compass, or the setting up of a
subordinate discipline, and only the correcting and reforming of the
Liturgy, perhaps it might have been borne more patiently.

Did Baxter find it so himself--and when too he had the formal and
recorded promise of Charles II. for it?

Ib.

But when the same men (Ussher, Williams, Morton, &c.) saw that greater
things were aimed at, and episcopacy itself i