services had been overpaid; no future service was to be
expected from him having appeared in the witness box as evidence for the
Crown, he could no longer be of any use as a spy on the Jacobites; and
by all men of virtue and honour, to whatever party they might belong, he
was abhorred and shunned.

Just at this time, when he was in the frame of mind in which men are
open to the worst temptations, he fell in with the worst of tempters,
in truth, with the Devil in human shape. Oates had obtained his liberty,
his pardon, and a pension which made him a much richer man than nineteen
twentieths of the members of that profession of which he was the
disgrace. But he was still unsatisfied. He complained that he had now
less than three hundred a year. In the golden days of the Plot he had
been allowed three times as much, had been sumptuously lodged in the
palace, had dined on plate and had been clothed in silk. He clamoured
for an increase of his stipend. Nay, he was even impudent enough to
aspire to ecclesiastical preferment, and thought it hard that, while so
many mitres were distributed, he could not get a deanery, a prebend, or
even a living. He missed no opportunity of urging his pretensions. He
haunted the public offices and the lobbies of the Houses of Parliament.
He might be seen and heard every day, hurrying, as fast as his uneven
legs would carry him, between Charing Cross and Westminster Hall,
puffing with haste and self importance, chattering about what he had
done for the good cause, and reviling, in the style of the boatmen on
the river, all the statesmen and divines whom he suspected of doing him
ill offices at Court, and keeping him back from a bishopric. When he
found that there was no hope for him in the Established Church, he
turned to the Baptists. They, at first, received him very coldly; but
he gave such touching accounts of the wonderful work of grace which had
been wrought in his soul, and vowed so solemnly, before Jehovah and the
holy angels, to be thenceforth a burning and shining light, that it was
difficult for simple and well meaning people to think him altogether
insincere. He mourned, he said, like a turtle. On one Lord's day he
thought he should have died of grief at being shut out from fellowship
with the saints. He was at length admitted to communion; but before
he had been a year among his new friends they discovered his true
character, and solemnly cast him out as a hypocrite. Thenceforth he
b