Revolution, and had attracted very little notice till a Dissenting lord
mayor, after attending church one Sunday forenoon, went in the afternoon
with all the insignia of his office to a Conventicle. Defoe's objection
to this is indicated in his quotation, "If the Lord be God, follow Him,
but if Baal, then follow him." A man, he contended, who could reconcile
it with his conscience to attend the worship of the Church, had no
business to be a Dissenter. Occasional conformity was "either a sinful
act in itself, or else his dissenting before was sinful." The Dissenters
naturally did not like this intolerant logical dilemma, and resented its
being forced upon them by one of their own number against a practical
compromise to which the good sense of the majority of them assented. No
reply was made to the pamphlet when first issued in 1698; and two or
three years afterwards Defoe, exulting in the unanswerable logic of his
position, reprinted it with a prefatory challenge to Mr. Howe, an
eminent Dissenting minister. During the next reign, however, when a bill
was introduced to prohibit the practice of occasional conformity, Defoe
strenuously wrote against it as a breach of the Toleration Act and a
measure of persecution. In strict logic it is possible to make out a
case for his consistency, but the reasoning must be fine, and he cannot
be acquitted of having in the first instance practically justified a
persecution which he afterwards condemned. In neither case does he point
at the repeal of the Test Act as his object, and it is impossible to
explain his attitude in both cases on the ground of principle. However
much he objected to see the sacrament, taken as a matter of form, it was
hardly his province, in the circumstances in which Dissenters then
stood, to lead an outcry against the practice; and if he considered it
scandalous and sinful, he could not with much consistency protest
against the prohibition of it as an act of persecution. Of this no
person was better aware than Defoe himself, and it is a curious
circumstance that, in his first pamphlet on the bill for putting down