Dr. Price,
when he talks as if he had made a discovery, only follows a precedent,
for after the commencement of the king's trial this precursor, the
same Dr. Peters, concluding a long prayer at the Royal Chapel at
Whitehall (he had very triumphantly chosen his place), said, "I have
prayed and preached these twenty years; and now I may say with old
Simeon, Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine
eyes have seen thy salvation".* Peters had not the fruits of his
prayer, for he neither departed so soon as he wished, nor in peace. He
became (what I heartily hope none of his followers may be in this
country) himself a sacrifice to the triumph which he led as pontiff.
* State Trials, vol. ii, pp. 360, 363.
They dealt at the Restoration, perhaps, too hardly with this
poor good man. But we owe it to his memory and his sufferings that
he had as much illumination and as much zeal, and had as effectually
undermined all the superstition and error which might impede the great
business he was engaged in, as any who follow and repeat after him
in this age, which would assume to itself an exclusive title to the
knowledge of the rights of men and all the glorious consequences of
that knowledge.
After this sally of the preacher of the Old Jewry, which differs
only in place and time, but agrees perfectly with the spirit and
letter of the rapture of 1648, the Revolution Society, the fabricators
of governments, the heroic band of cashierers of monarchs, electors of
sovereigns, and leaders of kings in triumph, strutting with a proud
consciousness of the diffusion of knowledge of which every member
had obtained so large a share in the donative, were in haste to make a
generous diffusion of the knowledge they had thus gratuitously
received.
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