Wesley Corpus

Yet at the same time all men of understanding acknowledge it as a rational instinct. For we feel this desire, not in opposition to, but in consequence of, our reason. Therefore it is not found, or in a very low degree, in many species of brutes, which seem, even when they are left to their choice, to prefer servitude before liberty. 2. The love of liberty is then the glory of rational beings; and it is the glory of Britons in particular. Perhaps it would be difficult to find any nation under heaven, who are more tenacious of it; nay, it may be doubted if any nation ever was; not the Spartans, not the Athenians; no, not the Romans themselves, who have been celebrated for this very thing by the poets and historians of all ages. 3. Was it not from this principle, that our British fore fathers so violently opposed all foreign invaders; that Julius Caesar himself, with his victorious legions, could make so little impression upon them; that the Generals of the succeeding Emperors sustained so many losses from them; and that, when at length they were overpowered, they rather chose to lose all they had than their liberty; to retire into the Cam brian or Caledonian mountains, where, if they had nothing else, they might at least enjoy their native freedom? 4. Hence arose the vehement struggles of the Cambro Britons through so many generations against the yoke, which the Saxons first, and afterwards the English, strove to impose upon them; hence the struggles of the English Barons against several of their Kings, lest they should lose the blessing they had received from their forefathers; yea, the Scottish nobles, as all their histories show, would no more bear to be enslaved than the Romans. All these therefore, however differing from each other in a thousand other respects, agreed in testifying the desirableness of liberty, as one of the greatest blessings under the sun. 5. Such was the sense of all our ancestors, even from the earliest ages. And is it not also the general sense of the nation at this day? Who can deny, that the whole kingdom is panting for liberty?