m the Court, from the Admiralty, and from the Council, and
was in danger of being also excluded from the throne, only because he
could not help believing in transubstantiation and in the authority
of the see of Rome, he made such rapid progress in the doctrines of
toleration that he left Milton and Locke behind. What, he often said,
could be more unjust, than to visit speculations with penalties which
ought to be reserved for acts? What more impolitic than to reject the
services of good soldiers, seamen, lawyers, diplomatists, financiers,
because they hold unsound opinions about the number of the sacraments or
the pluripresence of saints? He learned by rote those commonplaces which
all sects repeat so fluently when they are enduring oppression, and
forget so easily when they are able to retaliate it. Indeed he rehearsed
his lesson so well, that those who chanced to hear him on this subject
gave him credit for much more sense and much readier elocution than he
really possessed. His professions imposed on some charitable persons,
and perhaps imposed on himself. But his zeal for the rights of
conscience ended with the predominance of the Whig party. When fortune
changed, when he was no longer afraid that others would persecute him,
when he had it in his power to persecute others, his real propensities
began to show themselves. He hated the Puritan sects with a manifold
hatred, theological and political, hereditary and personal. He regarded
them as the foes of Heaven, as the foes of all legitimate authority in
Church and State, as his great-grandmother's foes and his grandfather's,
his father's and his mother's, his brother's and his own. He, who had
complained so fondly of the laws against Papists, now declared himself
unable to conceive how men could have the impudence to propose the
repeal of the laws against Puritans. [284] He, whose favourite theme had
been the injustice of requiring civil functionaries to take religious
tests, established in Scotland, when he resided there as Viceroy, the
most rigorous religious test that has ever been known in the empire.
[285] He, who had expressed just indignation when the priests of his own
faith were hanged and quartered, amused himself with hearing Covenanters
shriek and seeing them writhe while their knees were beaten flat in the
boots. [286] In this mood he became King; and he immediately demanded
and obtained from the obsequious Estates of Scotland as the surest
pledge of their