so as to make their own minds easy with their faults, which can scarce be without management, rather than to mend them.
But whether from men's deluding themselves, or from their intending to delude the world, it is evident, scarce anything wrong in public has ever been accomplished, or even attempted, but under false colours; either by pretending one thing, which was right, to be designed, when it was really another thing, which was wrong; or, if that which was wrong was avowed, by endeavouring to give it some appearance of right. For tyranny, and faction so friendly to it, and which is indeed tyranny out of power, and unjust wars, and persecution, by which the earth has been laid waste; all this has all along been carried on with pretences of truth, right, general good. So it is men cannot find in their heart to join in such things, without such honest words to be the bond of the union, though they know among themselves, that they are only words, and often though they know that everybody else knows it too.
These observations might be exemplified by numerous instances in the history which led to them: and without them, it is impossible to understand in any sort the general character of the chief actors in it, who were engaged in the black design of subverting the constitution of their country. This they completed with the most enormous act of mere power, in defiance of all laws of God and man, and in express contradiction to the real design and public votes of that assembly, whose commission, they professed, was their only warrant for anything they did throughout the whole rebellion. Yet, with unheard-of hypocrisy towards men, towards God, and their own consciences—for without such a complication of it their conduct is inexplicable—even this action, which so little admitted of any cloak, was, we know, contrived and carried into execution, under pretences of authority, religion, liberty, and by profaning the forms of justice in an arraignment and trial, like to what is used in
