lives for all thofe comforts and diftinctions which they have fo happily acquired; and laftly, of their fortitude in this, that there is no inftance of any people who ever recovered their liberty with fo much courage and fuccefs; and therefore let us not fuppofe, that there can be any perfons who will be more zealous in preferving it. I now feel myself irrefiftibly compelled to commemorate the names of fome of thofe who have moft confpicuously fignalized themselves in thefe times; and first, thine O Fleetwood! whom I have known from a boy, to the prefent blooming maturity of your military fame, to have been inferior to none in humanity, in gentleness, in benignity of difpofition, whofe intrepidity in the combat, and whofe clemency in victory have been acknowledged. even by the enemy: next thine, O Lambert! who, with a mere handful of men, checked the progrefs, and fuftained the attack of the Duke of Hamilton, who was attended by the whole flower and vigour of the Scottish youth; next thine, O Defborough! and thine, O Hawley! who waft always confpicuous in the heat of the combat, and the thickeft of the fight; thine, O Overton! who haft been moft endeared to me now for fo many years by the fimilitude of our ftudies, the fuavity of your manners, and the more than fraternal fympathy of our hearts; you, who, in the memorable battle of Marfton More, when our left wing was put to the rout, were beheld with admiration, making head against the enemy with your infantry and repelling his attack, amid the thickeft of the carnage; and laftly you, who in the Scotch war, when under the aufpices of Cromwell, occupied the coaft of Fife, opened a paffage beyond Stirling, and made the Scotch of the weft, and of the north, and even the remoteft Orkneys confefs your humanity, and fubmit to your power. Befides thefe, I will mention fome as celebrated for their political wifdom and their civil virtues, whom you, fir, have admitted into your councils, and who are known to me by friendfhip or by fame. Whitlocke, Pickering, Strickland, Sydenham, Sydney, (a name indiffolubly attached to the interefts of liberty,) Montacute, Laurence, both of highly cultivated minds and polished tafte; befides many other citizens of fingu lar merit, fome of whom were diftinguished by their exertions in the fenate, and others in the field. To these men, whofe talents are fo fplendid, and whofe worth has been fo thoroughly tried, you would without doubt do right to trust the protection of our liberties; nor would it be eafy to fay, to whom they might more fafely be entrusted. Then, if you leave the church to its own government, and relieve yourfeif and the other public functionaries from a charge fo onerous, and fo incompatible with your functions; and will no longer fuffer two powers, fo different as the civil and the ecclefiaftical, to commit fornication together, and by their mutual and delufive aids in appearance to ftrengthen, but in reality to weaken and finally to fubvert each other; if you fhall remove all power of perfecution out of the church, (but perfecution will never ceafe, fo long as men are bribed to preach the gofpel by a mercenary falary, which is forcibly extorted, rather than gratuitoufly beftowed, which ferves only to poifon religion and to strangle truth), you will then effectually have caft thofe money-changers out of the temple, who do not merely truckle with doves but with the dove itfelf, with the Spirit of the Moft High. Then, fince there are often in a republic, men who have the fame itch for making a multiplicity of laws, as fome poetafters have for making many verses, and fince laws are ufually worfe in proportion as they are more numerous, if you fhall not enact fo many new laws as you abolifh old, which do not operate so much as warnings against evil, as impediments in the way of good; and if you fhall retain only thofe, which are neceffary, which do not confound the diftinctions of good and evil, which, while they prevent the frauds of the wicked, do not prohibit the innocent freedoms of the good, which punish crimes, without interdicting those things which are lawful, only on account of the abufes to which they may occafionally, be expofed. For, the intention of laws is to check the commiffion of vice, but liberty is the best fchool of virtue, and affords the ftrongest encouragements to the practice. Then if you make a better provifion for the education of our youth than has hitherto been made, if you prevent the promifcuous inftruction of the docile, and and the indocile, of the idle and the diligent, at the public coft, but referve the rewards of learning for the learned, and of merit for the meritorious. If you permit the free difcuffion of truth without any hazard to the author, or any fubjection to the caprice of an individual, which is the beft way to make truth flourish and knowledge abound, the cenfure of the half-learned, the envy, the pufillanimity or the prejudice which measures the difcoveries of others, and in fhort every degree of wisdom by the measure of its own capacity, will be prevented from doling out information to us according to their own arbitrary choice. Laftly, if you fhall not dread to hear any truth, or any falfehood, whatever it may be, but if you fhall leaft of all liften to thofe, who think that they can never be free, till the liberties of others depend on their caprice, and who attempt nothing with fo much zeal and vehemence, as to fetter, not only the bodies but the minds of men, who labour to introduce into the state the worst of all tyrannies, the tyranny of their own depraved habits and pernicious opinions; you will always be dear to thofe, who think not merely that their own fect or faction, but that all citizens of all defcriptions fhould enjoy equal rights and equal laws. If there be any one, who thinks that this is not liberty enough, he appears to me to be rather inflamed with the luft of ambition, or of anarchy, than with the love of a genuine and well regu lated liberty; and particuarly fince the circumstances of the country, which has been fo convulfed by the storms of faction, which are yet hardly ftill, do not permit us to adopt a more perfect or desirable form of government. For it is of no little confequence, O citizens, by what principles you are governed, either in acquiring liberty, or in retaining it when acquired. And unless that liberty, which is of fuch a kind as arms can neither procure nor take away, which alone is the fruit of piety, of juftice, of temperance and unadulterated virtue, fhall have taken deep root in your minds and hearts, there will not long be wanting one who will fnatch from you by treachery what you have acquired by arms. War has made many great whom peace makes fmall. If after being released from the toils of war, you neglect the arts of peace, if your peace peace and your liberty be a state of warfare, if war be your only virtue, the fummit of your praise, you will, believe me, foon find peace the most adverfe to your interests. Your peace will be only a more diftreffing war; and that which you imagined liberty will prove the worft of flavery. Unless by the means of piety, not frothy and loquacious, but operative, unadulterated and fincere, you clear the horizon of the mind from those mists of fuperftition, which arise from the ignorance of true religion, you will always have those who will bend your necks to the yoke as if you were brutes, who notwithstanding all your triumphs will put you up to the highest bidder, as if you were mere booty made in war; and will find an exuberant fource of wealth in your ignorance and superstition. Unless you will fubjugate the propenfity to avarice, to ambition and fenfuality, and expel all luxury from yourfelves and from your families, you will find that you have cherished a more stubborn and intractable defpot at home, than you ever encountered in the field; and even your very bowels will be continually teeming with an intolerable progeny of tyrants. Let these be the firft enemies whom you fubdue; this conftitutes the campaign of peace; these are triumphs, difficult indeed, but bloodlefs; and far more honourable than those trophies, which are purchased only by flaughter and by rapine. Unless you are victors in this fervice, it is in vain that you have been victorious over the defpotic enemy in the field. For if you think that it is a more grand, a more beneficial, or a more wife policy, to invent fubtle expedients for increafing the revenue, to multiply our naval and military force, to rival in craft the ambaffadors of foreign ftates, to form fkilful treaties and alliances, than to administer unpolluted justice to the people, to redress the injured, and to fuccour the diftreffed, and speedily to restore to every one his own, you are involved in a cloud of error; and too late will you perceive, when the illufion of those mighty benefits has vanished, that in neglecting these, which you now think inferior confiderations, you have only been precipitating your own ruin and defpair. The fidelity of enemies and allies is frail and perifhing, unlefs it be cemented by the principles of juftice; that wealth and those honours, which moft covet, readily change mafters; they forfake the idle, and repair where virtue, where industry, where patience flourish most. Thus nation precipitates the downfal of nation; thus the more found part of one people fubverts the more corrupt; thus you obtained the afcendant over the royalifts. If you plunge into the fame depravity, if you imitate their exceffes, and hanker after the fame vanities, you will become royalists as well as they, and liable to be fubdued by the fame enemies, or by others in your turn; who, placing their reliance on the fame religious principles, the fame patience, the fame integrity and discretion which made you strong, will defervedly triumph over you, who are immerfed in debauchery, in the luxury and the floth of kings. Then, as if God was weary of protecting you, you will be feen to have paffed through the fire that you might perish in the fmoke; the contempt which you will then experience will be great, as the admiration which you now enjoy; and, what may in future profit others, but cannot benefit yourselves, you will leave a falutary proof what great things the folid reality of virtue and of piety might have effected, when the mere counterfeit and varnished refemblance could attempt fuch mighty achievements, and make fuch confiderable advances towards the execution. For, if either through your want of knowledge, your want of constancy, or your want of virtue, attempts fo noble, and actions fo glorious, have had an issue so unfortunate, it does not therefore follow, that better men should be either lefs daring in their projects or lefs fanguine in their hopes. But from fuch an abyfs of corruption into which you fo readily fall, no one, not even Cromwell himfelf, nor a whole nation of Brutus's, if they were alive, could deliver you, if they would, or would deliver you, if they could. For who would vindicate your right of unreftrained fuffrage, or of choofing what reprefentatives you liked beft, merely that you might elect the creatures of your own faction, whoever they might be, or him, however small might be his worth, who would give you the moft lavish feasts and enable you to drink to the greatest excefs? Thus not wisdom and authority, but turbulence and gluttony would foon exalt the vileft mifcreants from |