allen,
methinks, into the very dregs of Charles the Second's politics."
Assuredly Bishop Fleetwood had done better to reserve his
political opinions for private circulation, instead of exposing
them to the world under the guise and shelter of what purported
to be a religious publication.

But he belonged to the age of the great political churchmen, when
the Church played primarily the part of a great political
institution, and her more ambitious members made the profession
of religion subsidiary to the interests of the political party
they espoused. The type is gradually becoming extinct, and the
time is long since past when the preface to a bishop's sermons,
or even his sermons themselves, could convulse the State. One
cannot, for instance, conceive the recurrence of such a commotion
as was raised by Fleetwood or Sacheverell, possible as everything
is in the zigzag course of history. Still less can one conceive a
repetition of such persecution of Dissent as has been illustrated
by the cases of Delaune and Defoe. For either the Church
moderated her hostility to Dissent, or her power to exercise it
lessened; no instance occurring after the reign of Queen Anne of
any book being sentenced to the flames on the side either of
Orthodoxy or Dissent.

FOOTNOTES:

[137:1] In _Notes and Queries_ for March 11th, 1854, Mr. James
Graves, of Kilkenny, mentions as in his possession a copy of
Molyneux, considerable portions of which had been consumed by
fire.

[150:1] In a letter in his _Vindicius Liberius_ he says: "As for
the Christian religion in general, that book is so far from
calling it in question that it was purposely written for its
service, to defend it against the imputations of contradiction
and obscurity which are frequently objected by its opposers."

[154:1] Wilson's _Defoe_, iii. 52.

[160:1] See Somers' _Tracts_ (1748), VII., 223, and the _Entire
Confutation of Mr. Hoadley's Book_, for the decree itself, and
the authors condemned. After the Rye House Plot, which caused
this decree, Oxford addressed Charles II. as "the breath of our
nostrils, the anointed of the Lord"; Cambridge called him "the
Darling of Heaven!" Could the servility of ultra-loyalty go
further?

CHAPTER VII.

OUR LAST BOOK-FIRES.

The eighteenth century, which saw the abolition, or the beginning
of the abolition, of so many bad customs of the most respectable
lineage and antiquity, saw also the hangman employed for the last