Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 4.djvu/403

Rh value of money by length of time. I think the reproach of betraying private conversation, will not upon this account be laid to my charge. Neither do I believe he would have changed his opinion upon any score, but to take up another more agreeable to the maxims of his party, that the least addition of property to the church, is one step toward popery.

The bishop goes on with much earnestness and prolixity to prove, that the pope's confirmation of the church lands to those who held them by king Henry's donation, was null and fraudulent; which is a point that I believe no protestant in England would give threepence to have his choice whether it should be true or false: it might indeed serve as a passage in his history, among a thousand other instances, to detect the knavery of the court of Rome: but I ask, where could be the use of it in this Introduction? or why all this haste in publishing it at this juncture; and so out of all method apart, and before the work itself? He gives his reasons in very plain terms: we are now, it seems, ''in more danger of popery than toward the end of king Charles the Second's reign. That set of men (the tories) is so impiously corrupted in the point of religion, that no scene of cruelly can frighten them from leaping into it, and perhaps fom acting such a part in it as may he assigned them''. He doubts whether the high church clergy have any principles; and therefore will be ready to turn off their wives, and look on the fires kindled in Smithfield as an amiable view. These are the facts he all along takes for granted, and argues accordingly. Therefore, in despair of dissuading the nobility and gentry of the land from introducing popery by any motives of