and purge them from the scandals which some people had brought upon
them," nevertheless it was calculated to effect this object. The
Dissenter being a man that was "something desirous of going to Heaven,"
ventured the displeasure of the civil magistrate at the command of his
conscience, which warned him that there were things in the Established
form of worship not agreeable to the Will of God as revealed in
Scripture. There is nothing in the Act to the prejudice of this
Dissenter; it affects only the Politic Dissenter, or State Dissenter,
who if he can attend the Established worship without offending his
conscience, has no cause to be a Dissenter. An act against occasional
conformity would rid the Dissenting body of these lukewarm members, and
the riddance would be a good thing for all parties.

It may have been that this cheerful argument, the legitimate development
of Defoe's former writings on the subject, was intended to comfort his
co-religionists at a moment when the passing of the Act seemed certain.
They did not view it in that light; they resented it bitterly, as an
insult in the hour of their misfortune from the man who had shown their
enemies where to strike. When, however, the Bill, after passing the
Commons, was opposed and modified by the Lords, Defoe suddenly appeared
on a new tack, publishing the most famous of his political pamphlets,
_The Shortest Way with the Dissenters_, which has, by a strange freak of
circumstances, gained him the honour of being enshrined as one of the
martyrs of Dissent. In the "brief explanation" of the pamphlet which he
gave afterwards, he declared that it had no bearing whatever upon the
Occasional Conformity Bill, pointing to his former writings on the
subject, in which he had denounced the practice, and welcomed the Bill
as a useful instrument for purging the Dissenting bodies of
half-and-half professors. It was intended, he said, as a banter
upon the High-flying Tory Churchmen, putting into plain English the