CHAPTER VI.

DANIEL DEFOE.

THERE are, probably, but few, who, in the earlier period of life, have not perused, with the most intense interest, the romantic adventures of Robinson Crusoe. In reading that wonderful fiction, we ever seem to be present with the hero. We are with him when he is thrown by the waves on the shore of the desolate island; when, year after year, he resides there alone; when, after a lengthened period, the accidental discovery of a human footprint in the sand causes him, like the bird of night in Gray's Elegy, to

"complain

"Of such as wandering near" his "lonely bower
"Molest" his "ancient solitary reign;"

We are identified with him whilst he views with horror from the top of a hill the cannibal feast of the barbarians on the shore, and when, on a subsequent occasion, his rescue of their victim procures

him at last a companion in his loneliness; whilst we sympathize in his gratitude when the mutiny of an English vessel becomes the means of his return to his native country. We seem, in short, to be in the midst of his every perilous adventure, and his every happy deliverance. So well is the story told, that the reader, by a powerful sympathy, becomes, as it were, the hero of the tale.

That tale has found readers in every quarter of the globe; yet few of them have reflected that great as was the author in fiction, he was greater far in truth; that he was a man who went to the pillory for his opinions, and gave proof that, if needful, he would have gone to the stake; that he was one who frequented a meeting-house, who conducted a review, and who would, in later times, have been branded with the name of a political dissenter. Daniel Defoe dared to think for himself at a time when independence of thought was comparatively unknown. an honest man be, as the poet tells us, "the noblest work of God," Defoe was most undoubtedly entitled to that appellation. It is in this point of view that we propose to regard his character. That he was a

If

novelist not to be equalled is a mere accident of his history: that his opinions were in advance of his time, and yet that he never hesitated to avow them, constitute his highest claim to an approval which

succeeding generations have practically awarded, by carrying out the principles which he was among the first to maintain.

It

That district of the metropolis which possesses the tomb of the nonconformist poet who successfully disputed the honours of Parnassus with Homer and Virgil, is also distinguished as the birth-place of the greatest of English prose writers. It was in the parish of St. Giles, Cripplegate, where his father, an honest dissenter, carried on the business of a butcher, that Daniel Defoe was born, in the year 1661. was no light thing to be a dissenter in those days. The Stewart tyranny had just been restored in the person of an abandoned profligate; the Church of England, that Dagon which had fallen before the ark, not of the covenant, but of the covenanters, had been again set up in its place; and the legislature, drunk with loyalty, wreaked the vengeance of offended despotism upon unhappy nonconformity. The Conventicle and Five-mile Acts virtually abolished all public worship except that of the Established Church. Dissenters were compelled to hold their religious meetings in secret; and whenever they were discovered, their fellowship was put an end to by the civil officer, with an order to depart in the king's name. A social prayer-meeting would often procure for its members a night's incarceration.

Dissenters of the present day, who, with no fear of fines or forfeitures before them, frequent the meetinghouse in as much security as their episcopalian neighbours the parish church; who, from the countinghouse or the market, resort to their happy fire-sides without any to make them afraid on account of their religious belief, can form but a very inadequate idea of the sufferings which their predecessors underwent for their attachment to the glorious cause of truth and freedom. But it is still a question whether the religion of modern dissent be as vital as the piety of those early nonconformists. Earnest wrestlings with God must have been the prayers of holy men, who dared to address Him in their own words, when the church and the state had combined to forbid them. The supplications of those who were every moment expecting their assembly to be violently dispersed, could have been nothing less than "words that breathe," and "thoughts that burn." cution is undoubtedly the wind that fans the flame of genuine Christianity, and if it increase to a hurricane, the fire, instead of being blown out, will only burn with the more vivid intensity. No wonder that in the times of intolerance, a poor tinker of Bedford, incarcerated for daring to preach without authority from the state, should compose the

Perse

Pilgrim's Progress" in his dreary dungeon, No

POSITION OF DISSENTERS.

205

wonder that the Latin secretary to Cromwell, whom government would gladly have brought alive to the punishment which it inflicted on the dead body of his master, should retire into private life, and write "Paradise Lost." Such works as those, which are "not for an age, but for all time," are not produced now, just because religion is in circumstances so easy, that the value of its principles is not felt to the same degree by those who profess them.

In process of time, it was discovered, even by the besotted government of Charles the Second, that the outbreak of persecution it had at first engendered, failed in accomplishing the ends for which it was designed. An indulgence to dissenters was granted, which licensed their ministers and meeting-houses, under certain restrictions. At the same time that Bunyan came forth to enlighten the town of Bedford with the practical lessons of his prison experience, Annesley, whom the Bartholomew Act had ejected from the living of St. Giles, Cripplegate, was enabled to preach publicly in the meeting-house of Little St. Helen's. Upon the ministry of this godly man the father of Defoe attended, and not the least interested of his hearers was the youthful Daniel. The young nonconformist, fearing, in his zeal for the Word of God, that the intolerant government might go to the popish length of forbidding its circulation alto