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 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 drift of their furious invectives against the Dissenters, and so, “by an irony not unusual,” answering them out of their own mouths.

The Shortest Way is sometimes spoken of as a piece of exquisite irony, and on the other hand Mr. Saintsbury[1] has raised the question whether the representation of an extreme case, in which the veil is never lifted from the writer’s own opinions, can properly be called irony at all.