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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Preface to the Fourth Edition
Since the former editions of the following discourse, many animadversions upon it have been published. Under the abuse with which some of them are accompanied, I have been comforted by finding myself joined to the City of Paris, and the National Assembly of France. I cannot think of employing my time in making any replies. Knowing that it has been the labour of my life to promote those interests of liberty, peace, and virtue, which I reckon the best interests of mankind, and believing that I have not laboured quite in vain, I feel a satisfaction that no opposition can take from me, and shall submit myself in silence to the judgment of the public without taking any other notice of the abuse I have met with than by mentioning the following instance of it.
In p. 195,I have adopted the words of Scripture, Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace and expressed my gratitude to God for having spared my life to see a ‘diffusion of knowledge that has undermined superstition and error, a vast kingdom spurning at slavery, and an arbitrary monarch led in triumph and surrendering himself to his subjects’. These words have occasioned a comparison of me (by Mr. Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France) to Hugh Peters, attended with an intimation that like him, I may not die in peace, and he has described me, p. 99, etc. as a barbarian delighted with blood, profaning Scripture, and exulting in the riot and slaughter at Versailles on the 6th of October last year.
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