Before I proceed further, I have to remark that Dr. Price seems rather to overvalue the great acquisitions of light which he has obtained and diffused in this age.  The last century appears to me to have been quite as much enlightened.  It had, though in a different place, a triumph as memorable as that of Dr. Price; and some of the great preachers of that period partook of it as eagerly as he has done in the triumph of France.  On the trial of the Reverend Hugh Peters for high treason, it was deposed, that, when King Charles was brought to London for his trial, the Apostle of Liberty in that day conducted the triumph.  “I saw,” says the witness, “his Majesty in the coach with six horses, and Peters riding before the king triumphing.”  Dr. Price, when he talks as if he had made a discovery, only follows a precedent; for, after the commencement of the king’s trial, this precursor, the same Dr. Peters, concluding a long prayer at the royal chapel at Whitehall, (he had very triumphantly chosen his place,) said, “I have prayed and preached these twenty years; and now I may say with old Simeon, Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation."[89] Peters had not the fruits of his prayer; for he neither departed so soon as he wished, nor in peace.  He became (what I heartily hope none of his followers may be in this country) himself a sacrifice to the triumph which he led as pontiff.  They dealt at the Restoration, perhaps, too hardly with this poor good man.  But we owe it to his memory and his sufferings, that he had as much illumination and as much zeal, and had as effectually undermined all the superstition and error which might impede the great business he was engaged in, as any who follow and repeat after him in this age, which would assume to itself an exclusive title to the knowledge of the rights of men, and all the glorious consequences of that knowledge.

After this sally of the preacher of the Old Jewry, which differs only in place and time, but agrees perfectly with the spirit and letter of the rapture of 1648, the Revolution Society, the fabricators of governments, the heroic band of cashierers of monarchs, electors of sovereigns, and leaders of kings in triumph, strutting with a proud consciousness of the diffusion of knowledge, of which every member had obtained so large a share in the donative, were in haste to make a generous diffusion of the knowledge they had thus gratuitously received.  To make this bountiful communication, they adjourned from the church in the Old Jewry to the London Tavern, where the same Dr. Price, in whom the fumes of his oracular tripod were not entirely evaporated, moved and carried the resolution, or address of congratulation, transmitted by Lord Stanhope to the National Assembly of France.