Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 3.djvu/199

N° 36. that combination with their broken allies; but disperse themselves, and lie dormant against some better opportunity. I have shown they could have got no advantage, if the late party had prevailed; and they will certainly lose none by its fall, unless through their own fault. They pretend a mighty veneration for the queen; let them give proof of it by quitting the ruined interest of those who have used her so ill; and by a due respect to the persons she is pleased to trust at present, with her affairs. When they can no longer hope to govern, when struggling can do them no good, and may possibly hurt them, what is left, but to be silent and passive?

Secondly, Although there be no law (beside that of God Almighty) against occasional conformity, it would be prudence in the dissenters to use it as tenderly as they can: for, beside the infamous hypocrisy of the thing itself, too frequent practice would perhaps make a remedy necessary. And after all they have said to justify themselves in this point, it still continues hard to conceive, how those consciences can pretend to be scrupulous, upon which an employment has more power, than the love of unity.

In the last place, I am humbly of opinion, that the dissenters would do well to drop that lesson they have learned from their directors, of affecting to be under horrible apprehensions, that the tories are in the interest of the pretender, and would be ready to embrace the first opportunity of inviting him over. It is with the worst grace in the world that they offer to join in the cry upon this article: as if those, who alone stood in the gap against all the encroachments of popery and arbitrary power, are not more likely