t to the prejudice of this
Dissenter; it affects only the Politic Dissenter, or State Dissenter,
who if he can attend the Established worship without offending his
conscience, has no cause to be a Dissenter. An act against occasional
conformity would rid the Dissenting body of these lukewarm members, and
the riddance would be a good thing for all parties.

It may have been that this cheerful argument, the legitimate development
of Defoe's former writings on the subject, was intended to comfort his
co-religionists at a moment when the passing of the Act seemed certain.
They did not view it in that light; they resented it bitterly, as an
insult in the hour of their misfortune from the man who had shown their
enemies where to strike. When, however, the Bill, after passing the
Commons, was opposed and modified by the Lords, Defoe suddenly appeared
on a new tack, publishing the most famous of his political pamphlets,
_The Shortest Way with the Dissenters_, which has, by a strange freak of
circumstances, gained him the honour of being enshrined as one of the
martyrs of Dissent. In the "brief explanation" of the pamphlet which he
gave afterwards, he declared that it had no bearing whatever upon the
Occasional Conformity Bill, pointing to his former writings on the
subject, in which he had denounced the practice, and welcomed the Bill
as a useful instrument for purging the Dissenting bodies of
half-and-half professors. It was intended, he said, as a banter
upon the High-flying Tory Churchmen, putting into plain English the
drift of their furious invectives against the Dissenters, and so, "by an
irony not unusual," answering them out of their own mouths.

The _Shortest Way_ is sometimes spoken of as a piece of exquisite irony,
and on the other hand Mr. Saintsbury[1] has raised the question whether
the representation of an extreme case, in which the veil is never lifted
from the writer's own opinions, can properly be called irony at all.

[Footnote 1: In an admirable article on Defoe in the _Encyclopaedia
Britannica_.]

This last is, perhaps, a question belonging to the strict definition of
the figures of speech; but, however that might be settled, it is a
mistake to describe Defoe's art in this pamphlet as delicate. There are
no subtle strokes of wit in it such as we find in some of Swift's
ironical pieces. Incomparably more effective as an engine of
controversy, it is not entitled to the same rank as a literary exercise.
It