belabouring certain magistrates of their denomination. A pamphlet
entitled _A New Test of the Church of England's Loyalty_--in which he
twitted the High-Church party with being neither more nor less loyal
than the Dissenters, inasmuch as they consented to the deposition of
James and acquiesced in the accession of Anne--was better received by
his co-religionists.

But when the Bill to prevent occasional conformity was introduced by
some hot-headed partisans of the High Church, towards the close of 1702,
with the Queen's warm approval, Defoe took a course which made the
Dissenters threaten to cast him altogether out of the synagogue. We have
already seen how Defoe had taken the lead in attacking the practice of
occasional conformity. While his co-religionists were imprecating him as
the man who had brought this persecution upon them, Defoe added to
their ill-feeling by issuing a jaunty pamphlet in which he proved with
provoking unanswerableness that all honest Dissenters were noways
concerned in the Bill. Nobody, he said, with his usual bright audacity,
but himself "who was altogether born in sin," saw the true scope of the
measure. "All those people who designed the Act as a blow to the
Dissenting interests in England are mistaken. All those who take it as a
prelude or introduction to the further suppressing of the Dissenters,
and a step to repealing the Toleration, or intend it as such, are
mistaken.... All those phlegmatic Dissenters who fancy themselves
undone, and that persecution and desolation is at the door again, are
mistaken. All those Dissenters who are really at all disturbed at it,
either as an advantage gained by their enemies or as a real disaster
upon themselves, are mistaken. All those Dissenters who deprecate it as
a judgment, or would vote against it as such if it were in their power,
are mistaken." In short, though he did not suppose that the movers of
the Bill "did it in mere kindness to the Dissenters, in order to refine