California 
 
 >gional 
 
 cility
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 AT LOS ANGELES
 
 Brttannfcae. 
 
 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 INTERESTED IN 
 
 THE DISMISSAL OF MINISTERS. 
 
 A 
 
 VINDICATION OF THE PEOPLE 
 
 FROM THE CHARGE OF 
 
 ' BLASPHEMY, 
 
 
 
 AND A 
 
 DEFENCE OF THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS. 
 IN SIX LETTERS, 
 
 ADDRESSED TO 
 
 W. WILBERFORCE, ESQ. M. P., 
 
 AND THE 
 
 RELIGIOUS PUBLIC. 
 BY CHRISTOPHILUS. 
 
 " Methinka I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man 
 after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks : methinks I see in her an eagle muing her mighty 
 youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the fall mid-day beam ; purging and anskaling her 
 long abased fight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance; while the whole noise (if timorous 
 and flocking birds, with those also that love the twilight, flutter about amazed at what she meaiis, 
 and in their envious gabble would prognosticate a year of sects and schisms." 
 
 MILTON'S Speech for the Liberty of the Prett. 
 
 ' 7 3 5 l CONDON: 
 
 PRINTED FOR W. SIMPKIN AND R. MARSHALL, 
 STATIONERS' COURT, PATERNOSTER ROW. 
 
 1821.
 
 u. 
 
 LONDON : PRINTED BV J. MOVES, GREVILJ-E STREET.
 
 xtV 
 
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 THIS 
 
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 Bumble ainWcation .,. 
 
 or THE 
 
 00 
 
 PEOPLE AND THE PRESS, 
 
 IS INSCRIBED TO THE 
 
 LORDS AND " COMMONS 
 
 0'tii,i';lT .';;.'/ ,1ilyi:ii;'jljiviiot> J>ffil jr.'iu: 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNITED KINGDOM, 
 
 BY 
 
 8 ONE OF THE PEOPLE., 
 
 Oi i 33IIJ *'.'O r < 
 
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 QC 
 
 < " Lords and Commons of England, consider what a 
 Nation it is whereof ye are the Governors : a Nation not 
 slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious, and piercing 
 spirit, acute to invent, suttle and sinewy to discourse, not 
 beneath the reach of any point the highest that human 
 capacity can soar to. But now, as our obdurate clergy 
 have with violence demeaned the matter, we are become, 
 hitherto, the latest and backwardest scholars of whom 
 
 | God offered to have made us the teachers. 
 
 " Behold now this vast City ; a city of refuge, the 
 mansion house of Liberty, encompassed and surrounded 
 
 307127
 
 IV 
 
 DEDICATION. 
 
 with his protection ; the shop of war has there not more 
 anvils and hammers working, to fashion out the plates 
 and instruments of armed justice in defence of 
 beleagured truth, then there be pens and heads there, 
 sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, 
 revolving new notions and ideas wherewith to present as 
 with their homage the approaching reformation : others 
 as fast reading, trying all things, assenting to the force of 
 reason and convincement. What could a man require 
 more from a nation so pliant and so prone to seek after 
 knowledge ? What wants there to such a towardly and 
 pregnant soil, but wise and faithful labourers, to make a 
 knowing People, a Nation of Prophets, of Sages, and of 
 Worthies r" 
 
 f - N 
 
 MILTON. Speech for the Liberty of the Press.
 
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 'in K/ioiJ*wt> 'r-ufio f;i :>vj; ! 
 
 PTIEPACE 
 
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 THESE Letters have been hastily drawn up, 
 at the earnest request of some zealous 
 friends of Christianity. I have regarded 
 more the matter than the style ; and being 
 exclusively occupied in a laborious pro- 
 fession, possessing only the leisure moments 
 of the wearisome hour of midnight, I claim 
 forbearance from the critical reader. Hav- 
 ing been till within the last twelvemonth 
 intimately connected with the political 
 Press, and possessing considerable know- 
 ledge of the amazing mass of religious and 
 polemical publication increasingly diffused 
 throughout the whole empire; having also 
 much opportunity, from personal connexion, 
 for learning the habits and opinions of the 
 manufacturing classes of society, I have 
 esteemed it an imperative duty to vindicate 
 the Press, and to rescue my fellow-country- 
 men from the bold and sweeping impu- 
 tation of infidelity. It has been my wish, 
 as far as possible, to confine myself, in the 
 
 b
 
 VI PREFACE. 
 
 following Letters, to this one object, and 
 to avoid other questions of political and 
 controversial prejudice. 1 have abstained, 
 wherever I could, from any direct allusion 
 to party and doctrinal differences of opi- 
 nion, and am not aware that I have levelled 
 at either even an unintentional insinuation ; 
 yet if the cap may sometimes fit, I have 
 no desire to deprive the occupant of the 
 honour of wearing it. My argument is, 
 that a Ministry exhibiting such an igno- 
 rance of the real character of the People, 
 must be utterly incompetent to hold the 
 reins of government. The speech from the 
 Throne (January 23, 1821,) leaves them 
 completely in the lurch : and though the 
 eulogy on the loyalty of the People is 
 rather ambiguous, it is still sufficient for 
 conviction. Out of thine own mouths will I 
 convict thee. " I well know that, notwith- 
 standing the agitation produced by tempo- 
 rary circumstances, and amidst the distress 
 which still presses upon a large portion of 
 my subjects, the firmest reliance may be 
 placed on the affectionate and loyal attach- 
 ment, to my person and government, of 
 which I, have recently received so many 
 testimonials from all parts of my kingdom ;
 
 PREFACE. Vll 
 
 and which, while it is most grateful to the 
 strongest feelings of my heart, I shall ever 
 consider as the best and surest safeguard of 
 my throne." < j 
 
 Though a student of the laws of England, 
 I am also a Protestant Christian ; and in 
 that character I sometimes presume to read 
 my Bible, and to meditate on the laws of 
 Christ. There I discover the philosophy 
 and foundation of all law there I discover 
 the extreme variance of the acts of the 
 Ministry with the precepts of revelation 
 and there I have sometimes detected the 
 most glaring contradictions between British 
 and Gospel legislation. Whether it be right 
 in the sight of God to hearken to you more 
 than to God, judge ye? Acts, iv. 19. 
 
 Our Lord foresaw these days of pre- 
 tended zeal for religion. Not every one 
 that cries unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter 
 into the kingdom of heaven; but he that 
 doth the will of my Father which is in 
 heaven. Many will say to me in that day, 
 Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy 
 name ? and in thy name have done many 
 wonderful works? And then will I prof ess 
 unto them, I never knew you ; depart from 
 me, you that work iniquity.
 
 VJ11 PREFACE. 
 
 I have retorted on our calumniators, and 
 exposed somewhat of their irreligion. I 
 have told them, in the language of St. Paul 
 to the hypocritical Pharisees, YOU that 
 make your boast of the law, by breaking the 
 law, dishonour God ; for the name of God 
 is blasphemed among the Gentiles through 
 you. If the hearts of the People are estranged 
 from them, the cause is made evident. " The 
 general story of mankind will evince that 
 settled authority is very seldom' resisted. 
 Gross corruptions, or evident imbecility, is 
 necessary to the suppression of that rever- 
 ence with which the majority of mankind 
 look upon their governors, or those whom 
 they see surrounded with splendour and 
 fortified by power/' Rambler, No. 50. 
 
 If I am asked, how I, who have not the 
 license of " holy orders," can presume to 
 discuss religious matters, I answer, JESUS 
 CHRIST and his apostles were laymen ; and 
 the argument of these pages, in the hands 
 of a layman, is perhaps more likely to 
 meet attention, when it is known that the 
 writer has no worldly interest in advocating 
 the cause of Christianity. 
 
 My only fear is, lest, upon this exposure 
 of the ill accordance of the creed and prac-
 
 PREFACE. IX 
 
 tice of professors of the gospel, the unbe- 
 liever may found an objection against the 
 truth of revelation : he may think that 
 Christians cannot be persuaded of its Divine 
 origin, and yet show such sovereign con- 
 tempt for it in their daily violations of its 
 injunctions. It is, however, no reflection on 
 the soil, that weeds spring up, and beggar 
 the garden of Christianity : let the disgrace 
 lie upon the cultivators. It can be no 
 objection to the doctrine of Christ, that 
 many of those who profess it are not saints. 
 It would not be less absurd, says Bonnet, 
 to object against philosophy, that all those 
 who profess it are not philosophers : does it 
 follow from such a fact that philosophy is 
 not well calculated to make true philo- 
 sophers? Those who make the greatest 
 external profession of a doctrine, are not 
 always really and effectually convinced of 
 its truth, or most inclined to make it the 
 rule of their lives. Statesmen often regard 
 religion as an " arcanum imperii" among 
 the pegs and wires of state machinery. 
 STRABO tells us in plain terms " That it 
 is impossible to lead women and the com- 
 mon herd of the people to true religion, to 
 piety, and virtue, by philosophical argu-
 
 X PREFACE. 
 
 ment and reasoning ; but that recourse must 
 be had to superstitions." xix. SYNESIUS," 
 an ancient bishop, is of the same opinion, 
 where he says, " Ac uti ophthalmicis caligp 
 magis expedit, eodem modo mendacium 
 vulgo prodesse arbitror, contra nocere veri- 
 tatem iis, qui in rerum perspicuitatem, inten- 
 dere mentis aciem nequeunt :" " As dark- 
 ness and shade are more comfortable to weak 
 eyes, so I think false relations do more good 
 to the'common people. On the other hand, 
 truth is often hurtful to such who cannot 
 lifttheeye of their understanding to brighter 
 and more sublime objects/' Christianity, 
 however, disowns these spiritual hypocrites ; 
 and I would fain hope their numbers are 
 very few. But their impious coalition with 
 revelation cannot be used as an argument 
 against its truth ; if it were, the ruin of 
 every cause would be easy : the concealed 
 spy has only to insinuate himself in the 
 ranks of his opponent, to fight a sham battle, 
 and to suffer a preconcerted defeat. The 
 same observations apply to the well-inten- 
 tioned but ill-directed efforts of misbe- 
 lievers, who, in their zealous support of 
 Christianity, have opened such breaches for 
 the entrance of its opponents. " Every
 
 PREFACE. XI 
 
 man is not a proper champion for truth, 
 nor fit to take up the gauntlet in the cause 
 of verity. Many, from the ignorance of 
 these maxims, and an inconsiderate zeal 
 unto truth, have too rashly charged the 
 troops of errors, and remain as trophies unto 
 the enemies of truth*." 
 
 How many Deists have preached the re- 
 ligion of nature, and yet lived in the wildest 
 violation of its holiest dictates ! Who then 
 would charge the errors of Christians on the 
 great Founder of Christianity ? who would 
 cite them as proof against the honesty or 
 wisdom of its early professors, any more 
 than he would ascribe the corrupt practices 
 of a Cornish representative to the barons of 
 Runnameed ? To the sceptic, therefore, who 
 may read these pages with the hope of dis- 
 covering in my exposure of the hypocrisy 
 and arts of Christian empirics, objections to 
 revelation, I shall briefly recommend an 
 ingenious observation of a celebrated Pro- 
 testant, on a similar occasion : " These 
 persons tell us they are not the inventors of 
 Christianity ; and it may well be judged, by 
 their way of living, that they say true : for 
 
 * Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici.
 
 Xli PREFACE. 
 
 it is not probable they should have invented 
 
 the precepts of the gospel, and yet live so 
 
 contrary to them. Inventions always savour 
 
 something of the temper and spirit of the 
 
 inventors/' 
 
 < inn m!r;o:i > : m ; CHRJSTOPHILUS ; ''| 
 
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 LETTER I. 
 
 BLASPHEMY AND SEDITION. 
 
 To William Wilberforce, Esq. 
 
 " Two things there be which have ever been found working much 
 mischief to the church of God, and the advancement of 
 truth ; force on the one side restraining, and hire on the other 
 side corrupting the teachers thereof. But some are ready to 
 cry out, What shall then be done to blasphemy ? Then I 
 would first exhort not thus to terrifie, and pose the people 
 with a Greek word ; but to teach them better what it is." 
 
 A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes : 
 the author JOHN MILTON. 
 
 SIR, The time is now come, when an imperious 
 sense of duty towards my fellow-countrymen de- 
 mands, that I should shake off that " dust of an ill 
 tongue" which has so long enveloped their characters, 
 and which has made their sufferings and fortitude the 
 sport of the most daring ingratitude and the most 
 shameful calumnies. 
 
 I shall address these Letters to you, Sir, from 
 the high respect I entertain for your public and 
 private virtues ; from your known connexion with a 
 numerous class of British Christians, whose virtual 
 
 B
 
 representative in the House of Commons you have 
 always been regarded ; from the great influence of a 
 public character, independent of party and office ; 
 and, lastly, from my conviction that you are not a 
 mere speculative admirer of Christian virtue, but 
 that you are yourself an example of that religion you 
 so strongly recommend to the practice of others. 
 When the scales of political party have been 
 evenly balanced, the preponderating weight of your 
 character has determined the bias; and I am one of 
 those, Sir, however differing from you in the minutia? 
 of politics or religion, who from my heart believe, 
 that conscientious motives have always actuated 
 your decisions. I believe you to be a good and a 
 sincere man. But you well know, Sir and flattery 
 would not hide it from you that your conduct has 
 oftentimes been aspersed ; and that by many, who 
 respected your motives, the power of your mind to 
 withstand the cunning of those who coveted your 
 support has been often doubted. And you cannot 
 have forgotten that gross insult you received, not 
 many years since, from the mammoth of political 
 depravity, who represented you, when your honest 
 opposition of his colleagues got the better of his 
 discretion, as a constant mendicant in the purlieus 
 of the Treasury, though not for yourself, but for 
 your friends a libel which, you are well aware, 
 accords with this constant system of calumny on the 
 people ; since, though surrounded by a numerous
 
 class of relations, much below your own rank in 
 life, and honoured by a long and personal friend- 
 ship with Mr. Pitt, you rarely, if ever, solicited the 
 value of a shilling for any one of them. Admiring 
 then, Sir, your disinterestedness, and above all, 
 desirous to support and extend the influence of your 
 religious reputation, I address these Letters to you, 
 and through you to the Religious Public: not 
 meaning, by this designation of a large class of my 
 fellow-countrymen, the least invidious imputation, 
 but rather as a term of honourable distinction, and 
 from whose comprehensive embrace I would not 
 exclude any sect or party, nor age nor sex, who hold 
 and prove themselves entitled to rank under so 
 distinguished an appellation. 
 
 It has not escaped the penetration of any writer 
 on civil or religious freedom, that the convenient 
 bugbear of " church in danger," and " deluge of 
 blasphemy," is by no means the least among the 
 numberless auxiliaries political factions marshal in 
 maintenance of their own impieties. Many a 
 tottering party in power, where all other stratagems 
 had failed, has been supported by this convenient 
 prop : and was it not an historical excursion of too 
 great extent, I could trace these false terrors as the 
 chief pretexts for the imposition of religious restric- 
 tions ; for the repeal of the Septennial Act for the 
 adoption of standing armies for the numerous 
 suspensions of the Habeas Corpus Act and, in
 
 4 
 
 \ 
 
 short, for all those infractions of the Constitution 
 which have distinguished the very worst periods of 
 British history. It was this vile spirit of bigotry, 
 which has so often lit the blazing faggot over the 
 martyr's body, and stained the scaffold with the 
 patriot's blood. It was this " cursed ungodliness of 
 zeal" which not thirty years since surrendered up 
 this great city to fire and pillage; and which, in a 
 provincial town, destroyed the habitations of a 
 distinguished class of Protestant Dissenters, and 
 banished from his native land one of the brightest 
 ornaments of philosophical science. But not to 
 advert to past scenes of civil contention, over which 
 the veil of oblivion should now be drawn (and 
 which never should be removed, but to warn us 
 against their recurrence) this grievous spirit of 
 religious insanity may be well described in the words 
 of Addison, as " a clamour which, pretending to be 
 raised for the safety of religion, has almost worn out 
 the very appearance of it, and rendered us not only 
 the most divided, but the most immoral people upon 
 the face of the earth." 
 
 That the renewal of these demoniac passions has 
 for some years past been artfully attempted by a 
 certain desperate faction, cannot have been con- 
 cealed from any calm observer of passing events : 
 and to ,warn the Religious Public against falling 
 into the snare, is the especial object of these Letters ; 
 the immediate cause being the knowledge that many
 
 sincere friends of her Majesty the Queen, who 
 joined with so large a majority of the country in the 
 noble defence against her enemies, have yet refused 
 to attend public meetings, held for the purpose of 
 condemning the politics, and urging the removal of 
 the party now in power, alleging as their excuse, 
 that highly as they disapprove of the political 
 system of Ministers, yet that Lords Liverpool and 
 Harrowby are friends of religion, and that religion, 
 at this particular time, stands in peculiar need of 
 support, from the deluge of blasphemy gone forth 
 upon the Public ! 
 
 A more fatal duplicity than this, or one more 
 vitally dangerous to the interests of both church 
 and state, could not exist : and it can only be 
 accounted for in that intellectual cowardice which 
 but too often accompanies a strong and evangelical 
 sense of religion among the middle classes of society, 
 who, unused to the freedom of philosophical inquiry, 
 are dangerously sensitive to these spiritual alarms^ 
 For the private and domestic virtues of those twan 
 noblemen I entertain the highest respect; and *fc 
 scorn to defame the private character of ariy 
 minister for the purpose of ruining his public 
 influence. But those virtues must not be used as 
 scape-goats for the vices of Administration; and one 
 would almost desire their non-existence, rather than 
 they should be prostituted to such artful and anti- 
 christian uses. At present they are the mere bolsters
 
 of faction and the only crutches of an Adminis- 
 tration which, for mental imbecility, tottering 
 indecision, and public detestation, is unparalleled in 
 the annals of politics. Lord Liverpool and Lord 
 Harrowby having, however, now so completely 
 identified themselves with the system, they cannot 
 be separated from it, painful as it may be to include 
 them in the judgment : and they will rarely find 
 even so much liberality as in these observations ; for 
 it requires a more than common credulity to dis- 
 cover how the upholding such a system of irreligion 
 can comport with the professed and sincere love of 
 Christianity. Nor could it command my credence, 
 had I forgotten the darkness in which all are 
 involved, and the charity of that divine Founder of 
 Christianity, who, with compassion for the weakness 
 of human judgment, implored the mercy of Heaven 
 on his merciless enemies : " Father, forgive them ; 
 for they know not what they do." I recommend 
 to them the example of St. Paul, who was himself 
 \hrace a persecutor of religion ; I would address them 
 >a the language of the prophet : " Come out of her, 
 that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye 
 receive not of her plagues :" and I had almost 
 included them with the Religious Public, to whom 
 I am about to exhibit this pretended zeal for religion 
 in its true light to strip off its mask of hypocrisy 
 and tear the film from before the eyes of its 
 dupes.
 
 In the first place, the exterior cant of religion has 
 ever been the commonest cloak of impiety. All 
 persecutors and inquisitors have thought they acted 
 most like Christians, when they were most bar- 
 barous in ruining those who were really such ; and 
 that no sacrifice could be so acceptable to God, as 
 the destruction of those who most feared him. All 
 wars against religion have been carried on under the 
 colour of defending it ; and all religious hypocrites, 
 as Archbishop Tillotson well observes, have " lied 
 for the truth, and killed for God's sake." Thus 
 have Christians been enlisted against Christians, 
 and the great cause they ought to unite to promote 
 has been made to fall/e/o de se. To alarm the 
 laity about their spiritual interests, has always 
 enabled the Political Priest to seize their temporal 
 goods ; that thus, by setting the world in a flame, he 
 might the more safely plunder in the confusion : so 
 easily are the generality of mankind started on a cry 
 of" Stop thief!" never heeding to see whether there 
 really is a thief, until their pockets feel lighter from 
 the industry of those who accompanied them in the 
 chase. The Protector, when he dissolved his 
 Parliament (a circumstance not altogether unpre- 
 cedented in modern times), did it " by command of 
 the Lord :" and the sum paid for every license to 
 commit immorality to the church of Rome, that 
 Custom-house of sin, was levied in the name and 
 for the service of God. So says Josephus, when
 
 8 
 
 the thieves and vagabonds chose themselves a high 
 priest, and usurped power in Jerusalem, " They 
 used the temple as a castle and defence of them- 
 selves against the people ; and made the sanctuary 
 a .place for them to exercise tyranny in." The 
 same arts have been practised in our days, and I 
 fear but too frequently with their accustomed suc- 
 cess ; and the same scandalous attempt is made to 
 confound the friends of freedom with those mis- 
 creants, who, taking advantage of popular commo- 
 tion, have ever basely polluted its name. The 
 French revolution, Sir, that tocsin of alarm, again 
 rings in the ears of timidity ; and the atrocities of 
 its infernal agents are again the inexhaustible an- 
 swers to every expression of discontent. But will 
 you confound first and secondary causes ? Will you 
 impute to the writings of the French sceptics, who 
 were only the subordinate causes of infidelity, that 
 primary cause which originated in the gross and 
 palpable corruptions of the government and popery 
 " corruptions which at last produced a monster 
 that devoured its mother?" Will you attribute to 
 the licentious liberty of the press, that which in fact 
 originated in the despotic interdicts of the principles 
 of protestantism ? Will you deny that this oppo- 
 sition to the progress of Scriptural Christianity has 
 in all Catholic countries tended to beget scepticism 
 among the scientific and inquiring portion of society? 
 No, Sir; it is to prevent revolution, and to avert its
 
 attendant horrors, that all religious and enlightened 
 men seek to overturn a party, which, for its own 
 sinister ends, monopolizes all the patriotism and 
 religion of the country but bids fair, nevertheless, 
 to extinguish both ; which, by its conduct,- has 
 excited a spirit of party violence unknown in any 
 former times, and too likely, if it continues, to 
 prove the prelude of civil contention and bloodshed. 
 It is to disappoint those prowling beasts of prey, 
 who in all ages and all countries are seeking 
 through revolution the opportunity of wickedness, 
 that we oppose the system of Ministers. The 
 miscreant deeds of the instruments of the French 
 revolution can be no more charged on the friends 
 of freedom, than the inhumanities of those cor- 
 morants who violate the wounded and the slain 
 on a field of battle can be imputed to the heroes in 
 pursuit of the vanquished. But, liberty of con- 
 science, by the Treasury journals, is now accounted 
 a pretence for rebellion : all pleas for civil freedom 
 are deemed seditious all arguments for religious 
 liberty are denounced as blasphemous and the 
 just demand for a redress of grievances only 
 occasions fresh encroachments on our remaining 
 rights. The increase and aggravation of our 
 complaints is accounted their likeliest cure adding 
 to our burdens the mode of lightening them and 
 the " healing hand of time," the mystical hope of 
 deliverance. Such is the state of parties; and
 
 10 
 
 the men in power have now been so long in 
 command of the vessel of the state, that they 
 really think they govern us by prescription, and 
 that the fee-simple and freehold possession of 
 Downing Street " remains to them and their heirs 
 for ever." All legal and constitutional means of 
 cutting off the entail are either removed from us, 
 or proclaimed illegal ; and an Irishman, with that 
 noted philological zeal for the advancement of the 
 English tongue which has ever distinguished him, 
 has now added the terms " anti-ministerial," and 
 " traitorous," to our collection of synonymous 
 adjectives. Disrelish of him and his partners is 
 disaffection to the King; and endeavours to turn 
 them out of office, attempts to overturn the Consti- 
 tution. By how much the more we abjure the 
 invidious motives imputed to our conduct, by so 
 much the more are those imputations increased ; 
 attributing designs to us the most opposite to our 
 views, and to the evident scope of our writings 
 judging of others by themselves, as if there was 
 always a trick at the bottom of what we said or 
 did, as if we always said one thing and meant 
 another sticking up the scarecrow innovation, 
 (" as if new reformations ought not to be substi- 
 tuted for old disorders,") whenever we revive some 
 obsolete unfashionable truth and imputing to us 
 mercenary motives, forgetting with what much 
 greater probability they may be retorted upon
 
 11 
 
 themselves, who are rewarded with places and 
 pensions, with honour and authority ; and who, by 
 the bye, are, nine put of ten of them, converts, real 
 or pretended, from our own as yet unrewarded 
 opinions. If we express our judgment that an 
 accumulation of debt is not an accumulation of 
 capital that a man mortgaging his real property 
 cannot be increasing or securing it that a system 
 originating in poverty, continued in poverty, cannot 
 end in wealth that a continual call on our 
 resources cannot be the most judicious mode of 
 husbanding them that the more we borrow the 
 poorer we become that disbanding standing 
 armies, and reducing places and pensions (those 
 rivets of faction), are the legitimate modes of 
 reducing expenditure, and consequently taxation 
 that a liberal system of foreign policy is most likely 
 to increase trade, and revive commercial enterprise, 
 to enable us honestly to pay our debts, and to 
 become once more a free, happy, and flourishing 
 people ; if we speak or write these, or any of 
 these self-evident truths, we are called " dolts and 
 ideots," " wild and visionary," political jackasses, 
 traitors to our King and country ! If we observe, 
 under the patronage and combination of foreign 
 monarchs, war waged against neighbours under 
 pretence of preserving peace at home, we are de- 
 nounced as Jacobins. " Tanquam majus ullum 
 populo bellum sit, quam cum iis, qui legum feren-
 
 12 
 
 darum caus& creati, nihil juris in civitate relinque- 
 rent * :" " As if any war were of such consequence 
 to the people, as that which is carried on by those 
 who,' being brought into the legislature, and in- 
 trusted with the laws, overturn all law, and leave 
 neither right nor justice in the state." If we are 
 dissatisfied with the discouragement of civil free- 
 dom, under a pretended care for " social order "- 
 with the support of popery under an affected zeal 
 for protestantism if we see artful politicians and 
 bigoted priests procuring for themselves worldly 
 riches, and, in order to secure them, striving to 
 keep the people in ignorance or if we object to 
 the appointment of this or that particular individual 
 to ecclesiastical preferment, and to perform the 
 ceremonial part of religion we are instantly 
 proscribed as enemies of the establishment in church 
 and state, as disbelievers of the Christian religion, 
 and perhaps as avowed atheists ! 
 
 To such a pass are we now come ! And if the 
 people of this country are much longer to receive 
 the insult of such a faction, it requires no extra- 
 ordinary sagacity to foresee no spirit of prophecy 
 to predict that the cry of Wolf! will at last become 
 true, and that the state of our country will shortly 
 resemble that unfortunate plight of the Hebrews, 
 detailed in the last chapter of the book of Judges, 
 
 Livy.
 
 13 
 
 when " there was no king in Israel, and every man 
 did that which was right in his own sight." Yet it 
 is to support such a system as this, that the Religious 
 Public are called upon to rally round the present 
 Administration, in defence of their country, their 
 King, and their religion ! The old Christmas pan- 
 tomime of addressing is got up again ; and all that 
 numerous class of underlings, described by Tacitus 
 as the " instrumenta regni," (the " court tools" of 
 the Roman emperors,) are busily employed in be- 
 half of the Ministry ; and, in their masquerade dress 
 of ultra-loyalty, are exciting in the minds of the 
 friends of religion an hysterical feeling for its safety. 
 The advocates of Christianity are craftily exhorted 
 to lay aside all political feelings, and to unite hand 
 and heart in support of that religion which, Christ 
 tells us, " is founded on a rock, and against which 
 the gates of hell shall not prevail;" but which, 
 an Irishman tells us, is entirely dependent on his 
 continuance in office ; and which will be utterly ex- 
 tinguished when the apostolic missions of Castles, 
 Oliver, and Edwards, shall cease to stir up to righte- 
 ousness the hearts of the common people ! " After 
 my departing, shall grievous wolves enter in among 
 you, not sparing the flock." 
 
 The mitre and the crown are linked together. 
 Obey God and honour the King, is thundered from 
 the pulpit, with responses to the old tune of passive 
 obedience, in a style not beneath Dr. Sacheverell
 
 14 
 
 himself, and his borough congregation. And when 
 one reads the Jeremiades of the hole and cornermen, 
 and the moving appeals of the Treasury scribes to 
 the throne and the altar, the tombs of our kings, 
 and the graves of our grandmothers, one is led to 
 believe that these loyal diarrheas are parodies on 
 ultra-royalty, by the authors of the Rejected Ad- 
 dresses. 
 
 But here I must close an epistle already too long. 
 My object is not to deal with individuals, but 
 with the system at large. I may say, with Cicero 
 " Dies deficiet, si velim numerare, quibus bonis 
 male evenerit : nee minus, si commemorem, quibus 
 improbis optime :" " The day would not hold out, 
 if I should undertake to enumerate all the good men 
 whom evil befell ; nor would it, if I should reckon 
 up all the wicked men that have fared best of all." 
 
 For the sake of brevity and distinction, I shall 
 divide the subjects of my following Letters into five 
 separate heads: 
 
 I. As to the truth of the charge of Irreligion 
 brought by the MINISTERS of the STATE and 
 GOSPEL against the PEOPLE. 
 
 II. As to the religion of those who prefer the 
 charge, as set forth in their deeds ; and how far 
 their system of polity accords with the principles 
 of Christianity. 
 
 III. As to the real quantity and quality of the 
 " blasphemy" which actually has gone forth to the
 
 15 
 
 people through the medium of the Press ; what 
 means have been used by these Ministers for its 
 discovery and suppression ; and a brief contrast of 
 the amazing mass of Religious Publication. 
 
 IV. As to the conduct of the Clergy the only 
 real danger of the Church. 
 
 V. As to the LIBERTY of the PRESS in matters 
 of religion the causes and remedies of its abuse. 
 
 To lay facts before the public on these great 
 subjects of inquiry, is now, Sir, become absolutely 
 necessary, from the acknowledged fear of the press 
 entertained by the Ministry, and the consequent 
 contemplation of some " wholesome restrictions" 
 on its " licentiousness." It is notorious, that with 
 the exception of half a dozen daily papers and quar- 
 terly reviews, the whole press of the kingdom is 
 united against the present system of Ministers. 
 Scarce a solitary pamphlet in their favour can push 
 its head into notice. A more undeniable test of 
 public opinion could not be adduced : and it is 
 plain, that if Ministers are to keep in office, the 
 press must be silenced both cannot exist together. 
 Nothing is more amusing than to mark the charges 
 of falsehood and dulness brought against it in one 
 sentence, and the invocations contained in the next 
 of the aid of the magistrate to protect the Ministers 
 against its effects upon the understandings of the 
 People. That some scheme or other affecting it 
 will be among the first propositions submitted to
 
 16 
 
 Parliament, is not, I believe, a secret to you. Per- 
 haps the coffin and the grave are already prepared 
 in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and a preamble drawn de- 
 claratory of the sacred duty of preserving a part of 
 it inviolate for ministerial use, by a well-known 
 undertaker of the liberties of England. 
 
 I am, Sir, 
 
 With the highest respect, 
 Your obedient Servant and Fellow-Christian, 
 
 CHRISTOPHILUS.
 
 LETTER II. 
 
 
 AS TO THE TRUTH OF THE CHARGE OF IRRELIGION 
 BROUGHT BY THE MINISTERS OF THE STATE AND 
 GOSPEL AGAINST THE PEOPLE. 
 
 To William fVilberforce, Esq. 
 
 " Slavery has long since ceased to be tolerable in Europe ; the 
 remains of feudal oppression are disappearing even in those 
 countries which have improved the least; nor can it be much 
 longer endured, that the extremes of ignorance, and wretched- 
 ness, and brutality, should exist in the very centre of civilized 
 society. There can be no safety with a populace halfLuddite, 
 half Lazuroni. Let us not deceive ourselves. We are far 
 from that state in which any thing resembling equality would 
 be possible ; but we are arrived at that state in which the 
 extremes of inequality are become intolerable. They are too 
 dangerous, as well as too monstrous, to be borne much 
 
 longer. The condition of the populace, physical, moral, 
 
 and intellectual, must be improved, or a Jacquierie, a helium 
 servile, sooner or later will be the result. It is the people at 
 this time who stand in need of reformation, not the govern- 
 ment. The government must better the condition of the 
 populace ; and the first thing necessary is to prevent it from 
 being worsened. It must curb the seditious press, and keep 
 it curbed. This is the first and indispensable measure ; for 
 without this, all others will be fruitless." 
 
 Southeys Letter to Mr. W. Smith, 1817, 
 
 " I have had the satisfaction of receiving the most decisive 
 proofs of the loyally and public spirit of the GREAT BODY OF 
 THE PEOPLE; and the patience with which they have sus- 
 tained the most severe temporary distress cannot be too 
 highly commended." 
 
 Speech of the Prince Regent (in person) on the 
 prorogation of Parliament, July 17, 1817 ! 
 
 Sin, To the accusation brought against the 
 People, that they are immersed in irreligion, and the 
 patrons of " blasphemy/' I beg leave most abruptly
 
 18 
 
 to give the lie direct. From all that I have 
 personally seen and heard in the populous and 
 manufacturing districts of England and Scotland, 
 (and I possess peculiar means of personal know- 
 ledge and information relative to the quantity and 
 influence of religious publications,) I am morally 
 convinced that there is scarcely a shadow of ground 
 for the imputation. I do not mean to deny that 
 some attempts have been made to insinuate irreligion 
 with the doctrines of parliamentary reform so 
 current amongst them; but I do deny that such 
 attempts have been made by any of their popular 
 writers, or that they have met even with partial 
 success in any corner of the country : but more of 
 this in a subsequent Letter, wherein I shall expose 
 to you the real source of the blasphemy afloat, and 
 the singular impunity it has received from the law 
 officers of the Ministry. 
 
 I will appeal to the curious reader, whether 
 there has ever been a period in our history in which 
 there are not traces of this stale but not unprofitable 
 artifice, of levelling accusations on the part of the 
 government against the people, and thus shifting 
 the sins of the ministers from their own shoulders 
 to those of the victims of their selfish policy. 
 According to the political estimates of religion 
 contained in these precious state documents, from 
 the time of the first conversion of this island to 
 new year's day last, Christianity has been constantly
 
 19 
 
 losing ground ; and, in this sinking consumptive 
 state, the wonder is, that a shadow of its existence 
 can be detected. With regard to our ancestors, I 
 shall say nought: their pretended lamentations at 
 leaving Christianity in a worse condition than they 
 found it, were ably exposed by the late Bishop of 
 Carlisle, in that admirable sermon on " The Progress 
 of Religion and Science, and the Continual Improve- 
 ment of the World in general," from the text, (not 
 inapplicable to the present times,) " Say not thou 
 what is the cause why the former days were better 
 than these? for thou dost not inquire wisely con- 
 cerning this." The false and dangerous system of 
 villanizing mankind, is there painted in its true 
 colours. That the clergy of all classes should join 
 in this clamour, is extraordinary indeed ; for can 
 they be blind to the certain reflection on themselves, 
 who, though educated and paid to advance the 
 religious character of the people, profess not to be 
 able even to keep them from backsliding? " It 
 reflects (says Milton) to the disrepute of our 
 ministers also, of whose labours we should hope 
 better, and of the proficiency which their flock 
 reaps by them, than that after all this light of the 
 gospel which is, and is to be, and all this continual 
 preaching, they should be still frequented with such 
 an unprincipled, unedify'd, and laic rabble, as that 
 the whiff of every new pamphlet should stagger 
 them out of their catechism and Christian walking.''
 
 20 
 
 I could venture to say, that for this century past 
 every administration has had its Carliles. The 
 works of Woolston, Toland, Peter Annett, Morgan, 
 Paine, Houstan, Daniel Eaton, of Hume, of 
 Bolingbroke, and Gibbon, have had their successive 
 publishers and readers and yet Christianity still 
 survives ! Take courage, therefore, Mr. Wilber- 
 force; and do not fear that the " Temple of 
 Reason" in Fleet Street will supersede the revelation 
 of JESUS. 
 
 To return to the charge, however, as affecting 
 the People : surely the Religious Public cannot but 
 be indignant at the falsehood. This libel on the 
 country has been studiously spread by all the 
 catcalls of the Treasury, and echoed back again by 
 those of all others the most notoriously destitute 
 of all religious principle. Surely this convenient 
 and fashionable charge of the inroads of" infi- 
 
 o 
 
 delity " cannot but be regarded as a gross aspersion 
 of, and detraction from, the public and private 
 efforts of persons of all political and religious 
 opinions, to distribute the Bible, and disseminate 
 Christian principles. Indeed, a more palpable 
 calumny cannot be invented ; since, from the esta- 
 blishment of Charity and Sunday schools of 
 National and Lancasterian systems of education 
 the number of those who can read and write is a 
 hundredfold increased. The vast increase and 
 extended circulation of religious magazines and
 
 21 
 
 tracts exceed those of any other publications ; and 
 I shall lay before the public their almost incredible 
 amount, as the completest refutation of the charge.: 
 and I presume it may be taken as an undeniable 
 fact, that they would not appear in the market, were 
 there not a demand for them. Now, can it be 
 believed that this popular taste is co-existent with 
 such an imputative irreligion ? If so, this avidity 
 for religious writings is a singularly dear-bought 
 hypocrisy by those who have confessedly but barely 
 sufficient to keep their body and soul together. Is 
 it to be credited, that vice keeps pace with the 
 increase of knowledge, and that the Devil takes two 
 strides whenever the Philanthropist takes one. If 
 so, better at once that the King's printer should 
 return his patent for exclusively printing the Scrip- 
 tures better that the Bible Societies should cease 
 to translate the sacred records of truth into the 
 different languages of the earth that an Act of 
 Parliament were added to our statutes at large, 
 (though already large enough,) for depositing the 
 Bible within the archives of the Tower, as the books 
 of the Roman sybils were preserved in the Capitol 
 and that orders in council were issued, to collect 
 and chain up all men who exercise their own reason, 
 or teach others to burn that candle of the Lord, 
 with the wild beasts of the royal menagerie : 
 forbid the public reading of the word of God, as 
 the crafty lawgiver of the Lacedaemonians inter-
 
 22 
 
 dieted the public representation of Sophocles and 
 Euripides, out of a feigned respect to those illus- 
 trious dramatists. All ye echoes of the Treasury, 
 petition your Monarch, as Cardinal Wolsey did the 
 Pope, (in Harry the Eighth's time,) " That his 
 Holiness could not be ignorant what divers effects 
 the new invention of printing had produced. And 
 that which particularly was most to be lamented, 
 was, that lay and ordinary men were exhorted to 
 read the Scriptures, and to pray in their vulgar 
 tongue. That, if this were suffered, besides all 
 other dangers, the common people at last might 
 come to believe that there was not so much use of 
 the clergy ; for if men were persuaded once they 
 could make their own way to God, and that 
 prayers in their native and ordinary language might 
 pierce Heaven as well as in Latin; how much 
 would the authority of the mass fall ? how preju- 
 dicial might this prove to our ecclesiastical orders?" 
 And if this " frightful phenomenon" of the " in- 
 crease of latitudinarian principles " is the monstrous 
 birth of attempts to sow the seeds of knowledge 
 and virtue, drown all the Humane Society repeal 
 your laws against infanticide blow up your 
 asylums for the blind and the destitute fire your 
 hospitals and colleges and declare your peniten- 
 tiaries and societies for the suppression of vice 
 Spencean establishments for the begetting of sedi- 
 tion and blasphemy; tear down the statue of
 
 .23 
 
 Howard from its cathedral pedestal burn Mrs. 
 Fry and William Allen in Smithfield, with the paper 
 of Mr. Brougham's Education Bill and consume 
 Basil Montagu, and the Christian subscribers to his 
 society for the abolition of capital punishments, on 
 a funeral pile of the gathered copies of Beccaria, 
 and the Report of the Criminal ' Laws. Abandon 
 the wisdom of Solon, and give us the penal code of 
 Draco, who punished all crimes with death, think- 
 ing that the smallest transgressions deserved it, and 
 that no punishment was more rigorous for the 
 blackest atrocities. Burn all printers' devils, and 
 stop every paper-mill but that of the Bank of Eng- 
 land. Petition that none of his Majesty's liege 
 subjects should be allowed to use their eyes (for fear 
 of blindness) but through spectacles of state manu- 
 facture on the principle of that philanthropist who 
 is said to have voted for the window tax, from the 
 Christian motive of placing the blind on a level with 
 their fellow-creatures. And ye, ministers of reli- 
 gion, pray that the times may be brought back to 
 those golden halcyon days of polemical light, when 
 bishops set their (+) crosses to the creeds and 
 articles imposed upon posterity, for lack of a writing- 
 master ; when the office of the minister was a sine- 
 cure ; and when the laity performed their parts in 
 pantomime before images of their saints, buying their 
 sin-sponges for all lusts of the flesh, past, present, 
 and to come. Defile not the altars of the church
 
 24 
 
 with Aaron and Moses with the Apostles' Creed 
 and the Lord's prayer. As a rider on the late six 
 Acts, tack another totally expunging that clause in 
 the Bill of Rights for the public assemblage of peo- 
 ple on redress of grievances ; and let the curfew-bell, 
 as at the Conquest, again toll the wholesome hour 
 of retiring to roost. Substitute for Magna Charta 
 the old writ de hteretico comburendo; and burn 
 Hannah More on the old statute of witchcraft; (see 
 Hawkins's Pleas of the Crown, b. i. c. 3. on the sin 
 of raising the Devil). Restore again the cautelous 
 system of licensing the old index expurgatorius 
 of popery; our necks may now fit the yoke that so 
 galled our ancestors of old. And in the place of 
 Sir Roger L'Estrange, commission Dr. Slop to be 
 tbe door-keeper of the press ; and let his imprimatur 
 be the only passport to that " inspiration of the 
 Lord which giveth us understanding." Doubtless, 
 nothing could be more gratifying to the palates of 
 these political epicures than to reduce us to the 
 condition of blind worms ! " How goodly, and 
 how to be wished, were such an obedient unanimity 
 as this ! What a fine conformity would it starch 
 us all into ! Doubtless a staunch and solid piece of 
 frame-work as any January could freeze together !" 
 Rejoiced I truly am, Sir, in these great disco- 
 veries and that the eyes of Ministers are at length 
 opened to those scandalous and cheap publications, 
 " lottery puffs, exchequer bills, sale of bankrupts'
 
 stock, racing calendars, bank forgeries^ and insol- 
 vent schedules*." 
 
 But why need I expose these unmerited insults 
 on my fellow-countrymen ? Can it be necessary to 
 appeal to the fortitude and acknowledged patience 
 with which, during the last quarter of a century, 
 they have borne privations of the most trying and 
 touching description ? Was there ever any nation 
 under a king, that endured with more true loyalty 
 and religious fortitude the fiscal contributions to 
 the most direful warfare that ever swept with a de- 
 solating scourge over the happiness of the civilized 
 world? wars which (whether necessary or not, it 
 is not here my purpose to inquire,) have in their 
 consequences undeniably produced great fluctuations 
 in the demand and compensation for labour, and a 
 melancholy deluge of pauperism and misery. Taxed 
 from the crown of our heads to the extremities of 
 our toes, have we ever (with the exception of a few 
 local political irritations, excited by spies and incen- 
 diaries,) touched a crumb of our neighbours' property 
 or food, though often starving in the midst of plenty, 
 and with wives and children emaciated around us? 
 Hard is the case, Sir, where a willing labourer can 
 get nothing for the sweat of his brow ; and unknown 
 
 * For some insight into the defects and remedies of the Bankrupt 
 Laws, see a very superior volume, lately published, entitled, " Con- 
 siderations on the Origin, Progress, and present State of the English 
 Bankrupt Laws."
 
 26 
 
 to us is the mental conflict which broke his English 
 and independent heart to the scanty pittance of the 
 poor-rates ! During the war, no increased burthen 
 was imposed which was not preambled with an 
 eulogy on the loyalty and patriotic devotion of the 
 country. The speeches from the throne, in return 
 for supplies the prayers and benedictions from the 
 altar, on the annual thanksgivings for dear-bought 
 victories, won by the courage and lives of the com- 
 mon people implored the blessings of Heaven on 
 this generous and forbearing people : and so long 
 as the recruiting drum sounded its funeral knell on 
 the bosom of the mother so long as the press- 
 gang tore the unlicensed freeman from the bosom 
 of his family so long all was flattery and gratitude. 
 Are we, then, to be told, that without any assigned 
 cause Britain is become a den of thieves and blas- 
 phemers ? Is it to be endured, that the poet-laureate 
 should stigmatize the people as " one half Lazaroni 
 and the other half Luddites," when the speech from 
 the throne too assures us of the " loyalty and public 
 spirit of the great body of the people, and the 
 patience with which they have sustained the most 
 severe temporary distress?" If Mr. Southey is right, 
 wherefore, then, that " Carmen Triumphale" over 
 the result of the Castlereagh policy, and on the 
 " Pilate who weathered the storm?" and where is 
 the reality of that swollen Babel elation which has 
 described us " the envy and admiration of surround-
 
 27 
 
 ing nations ?" Is this " blasphemy" the conse- 
 quence of peace? and was it the chastening of war, 
 and the cupping of the war-taxes, that alone kept 
 down this rebellious spirit against Heaven and the 
 Throne ? If so, it would be better we should rush 
 into new wars, and preserve our political consist- 
 ency towards Sweden, Sicily, Genoa, and Parga, by 
 seizing the opportunity of a crusade with the Holy 
 Alliance against Naples, Hayti, and Spain, and 
 blighting those blossoms which now bloom on the 
 tree of freedom. Is this the reward of the families 
 of those brave soldiers who have perished in defence 
 of their country, whose bones have whitened the 
 plains of Europe, and who have planted the banners 
 of Britain in every quarter of the globe? Truly 
 this calumny comes with an ill grace from that 
 juvenile lord of the " nursery for young statesmen," 
 who, turning day into night, waltzes and quadrilles 
 at Almack's, " to the soul-inspiring strains of Coli- 
 net's sweet little flageolet." He who simpers at the 
 levities of a French play and just leaves the Satur- 
 day opera as the last clock strikes twelve, to join a 
 fashionable supper party has no license to talk of 
 " blasphemy" and sabbatical profanation. I ques- 
 tion whether, on an average, there is not equally 
 as much sense and political information among the 
 mechanics of an English or Scotch manufactory, as 
 at Almack's ; and though, in point of pedigree, they 
 may not be able to afford a purchase at the Herald's
 
 Office, or to draw cheques on the reputation of their 
 ancestors to mend the holes in their own yet 
 are they 
 
 " The sons of Adam and of Eve 
 Let Bourbon or Nassau go higher." 
 
 Mr. Southey, whose " early predilections" owe 
 much to the friendship and favour of the dissenters, 
 (and who might himself appear a more frequent 
 example in the parish church of Keswick,) has no 
 need to insult a large class of his countrymen, by 
 alleging, as one cause of this " blasphemy," that the 
 people are " dry nursed in dissent." And yet this 
 same Mr. Southey can write the Life of John 
 Wesley, (a very saleable article in Paternoster Row,) 
 the queen bee of the whole sisterhood, and the dry 
 nurse of the most active employ ; and can exhibit 
 that zealous Christian as having humanized whole 
 districts in Staffordshire, and other thickly populated 
 parts, whose inhabitants were before impervious to 
 any moral or political check. How can he reconcile 
 this piece of biography, the Letter to Mr. Smith, and 
 the Regent's Speech ? I shall leave him to settle 
 this with his Royal Master and to escape, as well as 
 he may, from his own contradictions ; and give him 
 the choice of which horn of the dilemma he thinks 
 least hurtful *to his Court side. The truth is, Sir, 
 that the passages and holes of the Treasury are 
 overrun with a certain vermin called a Treasury 
 beagle a species of political pimp, (some magistrate
 
 29 
 
 or receiver, well known in every provincial town 
 throughout the kingdom,) whose business it is to 
 report the opposition and ministerial force of his 
 neighbourhood : their evident interest is to blacken, 
 the character of the former, and to exaggerate the 
 
 < " oo 
 
 weight of the latter in property .and rank this 
 makes the labourer worthy of his hireand an 
 account of all that is " respectable,'' is a set-oft' 
 against numbers. Hence arises much of this cry 
 about " blasphemy," which is for the most part the 
 creature of the brain or the fears of these Treasury 
 beagles; and is so often repeated, that at last it 
 often perhaps deceives even the minister himself. 
 And when our liberties were abridged on the ano- 
 nymous communications of A and B from the roof 
 of a night post coach, no wonder this viva voce 
 perjury against the character of the people obtains 
 credence, and creates alarm in the same quarter. 
 
 The Administration has lost one of its ablest 
 auxiliaries one who never lost the opportunity of 
 defamation. .1 shall take the liberty of calling 
 that real " blasphemy," which makes the sanctuary 
 of public liberty the theatre of mockery to the 
 people's sufferings or errors; and which by misplaced 
 4 pleasantries" over the physical sufferings of unfor- 
 tunate age, has been said to afford a singular 
 accomplishment of Scripture prophecy, in the pre- 
 diction, 2 Peter, iii. 3: " That there shall come in
 
 30 
 
 the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts." 
 And when I call to mind the speeches I have heard 
 on the Lisbon job, and the many returns to the 
 embraces of his quondam and disconsolate friends 
 when I reflect that her Majesty the Queen left the 
 country partly from his advice, and that true honour 
 commanded him to stand by her in the hour of 
 trial I cannot think the foreign clime of opposition 
 at all congenial to the incomparable temper and 
 pliability of his nature. I confess I am reminded of 
 an apophthegm of my Lord Bacon, who relates, that 
 one day expressing to Gondomar his desire to be 
 rid of the burden of honours, and to lead a private 
 life, Gondomar answered him, " That he would 
 tell him a tale of an old rat, that would needs 
 leave the world, and acquainted the young rats that 
 he would retire into his hole, and spend his days 
 solitarily, and would enjoy no more comfort ; and 
 commanded them, upon his high displeasure, not to 
 offer to come in unto him. They forbore two or 
 three days : at last, one that was more hardy than the 
 rest, incited some of his fellows to go in with him, 
 and he would venture to see how his father did ; for 
 he might be dead. They went in, and found the old 
 rat sitting in the midst of a rich Parmesan cheese! 
 So Gondomar applied the fable after his witty 
 manner." (103.) 
 
 Before I close this Letter, I must dig still deeper
 
 31 
 
 towards the root of the evil ; and remark on that 
 gross ignorance of the principles of Christianity and 
 human nature, which represents a natural aversion 
 of religion as inherent in the mind of man : and in 
 this observation I have no relation whatever to the 
 origin or nature of sin. Man is a religious creature : 
 and in the disbelief of this fact originate half those 
 puling alarms for the safety and retention of 
 revelation. The denial of his superstitious nature 
 is scarcely credible in those who have read, in every 
 page of history, his strong, innate, unconquerable 
 propensity to piety and devotion. No possessions 
 have been so devotedly defended as the altars of our 
 native gods; and it is a singular fact, that most 
 ancient and modern conquests have been more or 
 less permanent, as they respected the religion of the 
 conquered. From Romulus to Napoleon, experience 
 has dictated this needful policy; the language of 
 ambitious conquerors has always been " Give us 
 your liberties and your property, but keep your 
 religion." And on the other hand, history exhibits 
 to us the most cruel interminable warfare waged on 
 its behalf. Not only the Jewish records, but all 
 history, sacred and profane, prove, that where there 
 was not the knowledge of God, in spirit and in 
 truth, the nations of the earth have prostrated 
 themselves before graven images. The oracles of 
 old, and the shrines of saints, bear witness to the 
 credulity and liberality of our religious dispositions ;
 
 32 
 
 and the catalogue of divinities was as comprehensive 
 as the ark of Noah. 
 
 " Jussit quare templa ruunt antiqua deorum ?" 
 
 Cats have raised sieges, where all the arts of war 
 had been resorted to. When Troy was in flames, 
 " jEneas left his wife to take care of his gods." 
 The " Dii immortales" were the classical incentives 
 to patriotism and self-devotion : and to this sensitive 
 part of our nature Cicero and Demosthenes poured 
 forth their eloquent appeals. The Druid, the 
 Dervise, and the wandering Pilgrim, have ever been 
 welcome guests in the humble and lonely cottage. 
 And when we walk through our National Museum, 
 and see the gods of Egypt, Mexico, and Indostan 
 when we contemplate those magnificent remains of 
 Grecian sculpture consecrated to religion and the 
 deities of Athens when we traverse the plains of 
 Salisbury, and see those tumuli over our pious 
 ancestors, and those striking ruins of the Druidical 
 worship of our forefathers who can doubt the 
 religious inclinations of human nature ? The poetical 
 judgment of Milton describes our first parents at 
 their morning devotions in the open field of nature 
 
 " But first from under shady arborous roof, 
 Soon as they forth were come to open sight 
 
 Of day-spring, and the sun 
 
 Lowly they bowed, adoring." 
 
 And again represents them at their evening worship, 
 as appearing under the canopy of heaven, and
 
 33 
 
 naturally receiving the inspiration of religion from 
 the glorious objects around them 
 
 " Thus, at their shady lodge arrived, both stood, 
 Both turned, and under open sky adored 
 The God that made both sky, air, earth, and heaven, 
 Which they beheld ; the moon's resplendent globe, 
 And starry pole : thou also mad'st the night, 
 Maker Omnipotent." 
 
 Lord Bacon says, " The contemplative atheist is 
 rare." It is notoriously a question with most 
 divines, whether there really exists such a non- 
 descript as a real atheist in the world. If there be 
 one, I can only compare the mind of such a lusus 
 naturtz to that first state of the earth " when it was 
 without form and void." But, in the uncertain and 
 problematical state of the question, I may safely 
 say surely there needs no provision against this 
 monster. 
 
 Let me ask you, Sir, who were the thronged and 
 pressing multitudes at the parables and miracles of 
 our Saviour who were that great multitude who 
 " spread their garments in the way, and pthers cut 
 down branches off the trees, and strewed them in 
 the way, and went before him, crying, Hosannah ! 
 blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord !" 
 and bore our Saviour in triumph to Jerusalem ? All 
 their prejudices against him were stirred up by the 
 Scribes and Pharisees. The Scripture tells us 
 (Luke, xiv. 10.) that " the chief priests and Scribes 
 stood and vehemently accused him. And " Pilate, 
 
 D
 
 34 
 
 when he had called together the chief priests and 
 the rulers of the people, and said unto them, Ye 
 have brought this man unto me, as one that per- 
 verteth the people : and, behold, I having examined 
 him before you, have found no fault in this man 
 touching those things whereof you accuse him. 
 They cried out at once, Crucify him, Crucify him !" 
 The history continues, (v. 27.) " There followed 
 him a great -company of people, and of women, 
 which also bewailed him." Jesus was elevated on 
 the cross ; (v. 35.) the people stood " beholding him : 
 and the rulers also with them, deriding him." And 
 when those last awful circumstances had taken place, 
 what says the history? (v. 48.) That "all the people 
 that came together to that sight, beholding the 
 things which were done, smote their breasts and 
 returned." Again, Sir, who was it who with re- 
 lentless animosity followed up their impieties, and 
 had the sepulchre watched, " lest his disciples come 
 by night, and steal him away, and say unto the 
 people, He is risen from the dead?" The first 
 evangelist will answer the question, (xxvii. 6*2.) 
 " The chief priests and Pharisees came together to 
 Pilate f It was not the Jewish priesthood, nor 
 those in authority, who fostered the Son of God ; 
 but rather the ignorant fishermen of Galilee, those 
 humble penitents, who " stood by the cross weep- 
 ing." These were the disciples, who, " when he 
 was parted from them, and carried up into heaven,
 
 35 
 
 worshipped him, and returned to Jerusalem with 
 great joy." 
 
 Thus, Sir, you see that the people had, as usual, 
 less to do with " blasphemy" and the Scribes and 
 Pharisees more, than may have struck you before. 
 And if this holy and admirable religion was de- 
 signed by our Saviour for, or zealously adopted by 
 any particular class of mankind, it was by the poor 
 and unlearned. Was it Pilate, or Herod, or Felix, 
 or Agrippa was it Titus, or Nero, or Julian the 
 Apostate who fed the flock of Christ? No, Sir; it 
 was the People, who flew to it with open arms, as 
 the Gospel, fJayytAioi', or good tidings. It was the 
 people, whom Peter, in his first eloquent description 
 of the Christian hope, exhorted to save themselves 
 from that " untoward generation," (Acts, ii. & xL) 
 (the Scribes and Pharisees ;) " and they (the people), 
 gladly receiving his word, were baptized, and the 
 same day were added to the disciples three thousand 
 souls." It was on the miracle of the man restored, 
 (Acts, iii. & ix.) " that the people saw him walking 
 and praising God, and were filled with wonder and 
 amazement." And as the " apostles spoke unto 
 the people," (iv. 1 .) it was the priests and the Cap? 
 tain of the temple and the Sadducees, " who came 
 upon them, being grieved that they (the apostles) 
 taught the people, and preached through Jesus 
 the resurrection of the dead. And they (the priests, 
 Captain, and Sadducees,) laid hands on them/' and 
 put them in hold until the next day. " Hovrbeit
 
 36 
 
 many of them (the people) which heard the word, 
 believed ; and the number of these men was about 
 five thousand." On the succeeding occasion, (Acts, 
 iv. 32.) the " multitude of them that believed were 
 of one heart and one soul, and with great power 
 gave the apostles witness of the resurrection of the 
 Lord Jesus." You cannot but know, Sir, the 
 sequel of this apostolic history, and what drove the 
 first planters of Christianity from this fertile soil of 
 its early growth. You cannot but recollect that 
 there came a " multitude out of the cities round 
 about Jerusalem," bringing the sick and the afflicted ; 
 and that " then the High Priest rose up, and all 
 they that were with him (which is the sect of the 
 Sadducees), and were filled with indignation ; and 
 laid their hands upon the apostles, and put them in 
 the common prison." You will recollect that " the 
 angel of the Lord by night opened the prison doors, 
 and brought them forth, and said, Go, stand forth 
 and speak in the temple to the people all the words 
 of this life ;" and that when liberated, and 
 teaching in the temple, the " High Priest came, and 
 they that were with him," and called the " Council 
 together ; and all the Senate of the children of Israel 
 pursued them, and took counsel to slay them," and 
 had them " beaten, and commanded that they 
 should not speak in the name of Jesus." You will 
 remember, Sir, that in the ministry of Stephen, 
 " There arose certain, in the synagogue, Libertines, 
 Cyrenians, and Alexandrians," (a holy alliance),
 
 37 
 
 / 
 
 " and were not able to resist the wisdom and the 
 spirit with which he spoke. Then they suborned 
 men, which said, We have heard him speak blasphe- 
 mous words against Moses and against God. And 
 they stirred up the people, and the elders, and the 
 Scribes ; and came upon him, and caught him, and 
 brought him to the council, and set up false wit- 
 nesses, which said, We have heard him speak 
 blasphemous words against the holy place and the 
 law. For we have heard him say, that this Jesus 
 of Nazareth shall destroy this place, and shall 
 change the customs which Moses delivered us." 
 The High Priest then put the question, " Are these 
 things so ? They then cried out with a loud voice, 
 and stopped their ears, and ran in upon Stephen 
 with one accord ; and cast him out of the city, and 
 stoned him. And at that time there was a great 
 persecution against the church which was at Jeru- 
 salem." 
 
 Here, Sir, is a revelation ; and let him that has 
 eyes to see, see. I have said enough, without risk- 
 ing any inferences ; and shall now leave this argu- 
 ment in the hands of the Gentiles. We do not 
 find that Pliny, Suetonius, or Tacitus, adopted this 
 persecuted religion. The Scribes and Pharisees 
 stood aloof from it ; nor did the great men of the 
 earth meddle with it till the worldly alloy had 
 encrusted it : the philosophers were not converts till 
 the spirit of popery added Platonism to it, as a bait
 
 38 
 
 for the proud academic. No, Sir ; it was the 
 Common People, " whose greatest crime," says Pliny, 
 " was on a certain day to meet together and sing 
 hymns to Christ as to a Deity, and afterwards bind 
 themselves together by a common sacrament not to 
 commit any immorality, but to live justly, without 
 theft, adultery, or other sin." It was the courage 
 and understanding of the People that planted the 
 cross of Christ on the heathen temples, and their 
 invincible constancy that finally triumphed over all 
 persecutions. Thus writes Tertullian, in that beau- 
 tiful testimony to their fortitude: " Exquisitior 
 quffique crudelitas, illecebra magis est secta? ; plures 
 efficimur quoties metimur a vobis; semen est san- 
 guis Christianorum :" " The cruelty of their enemies 
 did but increase their number ; the harvest of their 
 pretended justice was but the seed-time of Chris- 
 tianity; and no seed was so fruitful as that which 
 was steeped in the blood of martyrs." 
 
 Now, Mr. Wilberforce, I put it to your under- 
 standing : If Christianity thus survived its early 
 infancywhen neither honourable, profitable, nor 
 popular when it was the derision of philosophy, 
 and the contempt of learning when the wit of 
 the age was arrayed against it when hated by the 
 priesthood, and persecuted by the magistrate I 
 ask you, Sir, if Christianity was thus enabled to 
 triumph, by the support of the common people 
 under the favour of Heaven, whether you or any
 
 39 
 
 one will dare to tell us that it is now in danger, 
 when the public prejudices, the learning, the 
 
 * 
 
 wealth, and the whole influence of the country, 
 and still further, when the shield and buckler of the 
 Attorney-General, are on its side ? It is in vain to 
 tell me of apostates, blasphemers, and infidels : they 
 are far more thickly strewed among " Walpole's 
 Royal and Noble Authors." Jesus Christ tells us 
 it is difficult for a rich man to enter into the 
 kingdom of heaven. Who then, Mr. Wilberforce, 
 will get there, if the common people miss their way ? 
 And think you the blind can lead the blind ? Let 
 the People then journey by themselves. Give them 
 the Bible, and do you lead the way on the high 
 road. If they choose not to follow, " who usurps 
 the judgment-seat of Christ?" If knowledge is 
 power, ignorance is the devil. Teach them to 
 read, the rest will follow in due time. 
 
 I am, Sir, 
 
 With the highest respect, 
 Your obedient Servant and Fellow-Christian, 
 
 CHRISTOPHILUS.
 
 LETTER III. 
 
 ON THE RELIGION OF THOSE WHO HAVE MADE THE 
 CHARGE OF BLASPHEMY AND SEDITION" AGAINST 
 THE PEOPLE; AND HOW FAR THEIR POLITICAL 
 SYSTEM ACCORDS WITH THE PRECEPTS OF CHRIS- 
 TIANITY. 
 
 To William Wilberforce, Esq. 
 
 " Judge not, that ye be not judged; for with what judgment ye 
 judge, ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, 
 it shall be measured to you again. And why heholdest thou 
 the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the 
 beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to 
 thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye ; and 
 behold a beam is in thine own eye ? Thou hypocrite, first 
 cast out the beam out of thine own eye ; and then shall thou 
 see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye." 
 
 JESWS CHRIST, Matt. vii. 
 
 " As soon as corruption ceases to be an expedient of govern- 
 ment, (and it will cease as soon as a patriot king is raised to 
 the throne,) the panacea is applied : the spirit of the Consti- 
 tution revives of course ; and, as fast as it revives, the orders 
 and forms of the Constitution are restored to their primitive 
 integrity, and become what they were intended to be, real 
 barriers against arbitrary power, not blinds nor masks under 
 which tyranny may lie concealed. Men decline easily from 
 virtue ; for there is a devil too in the political system, a 
 constant tempter at hand : a patriot king will want neither 
 power nor inclination to cast out this devil. Under him the 
 people will not only cease to do evil, but learn to do well ; 
 for by rendering public virtue and real capacity the sole 
 means of acquiring any degree of power or profit in the state, 
 he will set the passions of their hearts on the side of liberty 
 and good government. First, then, he must begin to govern 
 as soon as he begins to reign. His first care will be, no 
 doubt, to purge his court, and to call into the administration 
 such men, as he can assure himself will serve on the same 
 principles on which he intends to govern.*' 
 
 Lord BOLIMGBROKE'S " Idea of a Patriot King." 
 
 SIR, Neither the object nor the space of this 
 Letter will admit of an essay on the principles which 
 have governed the different administrations of the
 
 41 
 
 last reign. Indeed, my desire has been, as much 
 as possible, to avoid all subjects of party difference 
 and prejudice, and merely to consider the present 
 political system, so far as it relates to the influence 
 and authority of Christianity. Before I descend, 
 therefore, to the details of real " blasphemy," I 
 shall merely put it to your Christian heart to 
 inquire, In what consists the Christianity of that 
 system which is fast cutting our country into two 
 unequal and opposing divisions, the rich and the 
 poor; breaking down all those intermediate gra- 
 dations of society which are the sinews and the 
 ligaments of the political body; and which is 
 engendering an unexampled spirit of party ani- 
 mosity and violence, in defiance of that last and 
 solemn commandment of Christ, " A new com- 
 mandment I give unto you, that ye love one another, 
 as I have loved you " an animosity which no 
 Christian or patriotic Englishman can view without 
 feelings of the deepest sorrow, and the certain con- 
 sequences of which cannot but appal the apprehen- 
 sions of those who know and fear the desolating 
 scourges of civil war? Where is the Christianity 
 of that system which, with the most vile and unjus- 
 tifiable selfishness, is anticipating the property of 
 posterity, laying burdens on the child unborn, and 
 reconciling us to the dangers of their financial 
 bubbles with the assurance that they will last
 
 our day, caring nothing for the explosion of their 
 expedients over the heads of our children ? 
 
 ;;i;)-'j-.'V i:i-' ".;' 5 \' ' 
 
 " Blest paper credit! last and best supply, 
 That lends corruption lighter wings to fly ! 
 Gold, imp'd by thee, can compass mighty things, 
 Can purchase states, can fetch and carry kings 1" POPE. 
 
 O ' J .' . lii*l' ' ' 'i- 
 
 But to follow my pursuit of " blasphemy" I 
 think I shall discover a trace of it in that profusion 
 of oaths still sanctioned by the Legislature in the 
 Excise, the Customs, and the processes of the law 
 impieties which, though ludicrously styled by the 
 Author of the Commentaries " pious perjuries," 
 are in my sight hourly violations of the Divine 
 commandment, " Thou shalt not take the name of 
 the Lord thy God in vain, for the Lord will not hold 
 him guiltless that taketh his name in vain." I shall 
 trace it again in the system of those who " consider 
 Old Sarum an integral part of the British Con- 
 stitution" who in numerous boroughs septennially 
 sacrifice victims on the altars of Moloch who 
 return, as " duly elected," the representatives of those 
 who, having sold themselves to the highest bidder, 
 consummate their treason to their country in the 
 following blasphemy of God : "I have not received or 
 had by myself, or any other person whatsoever in 
 trust for me, or for my use and benefit, directly or 
 indirectly, any sum or sums of money, office, place,
 
 43 
 
 or employment, gift or reward, or any promise or 
 security for any money, office, employment, or gift, 
 in order to give my vote at this election ; and that 
 I have not been before polled. So help me God" 
 (Bribery Oath, Stat. 2 Geo. II. c. 24.) So much 
 for the blasphemy carried on out of doors ; and a 
 late penal Act against bringing Parliament into 
 " contempt," coupled with a natural deference 
 towards the powers of the Attorney-General, alone 
 prevents my tracing the sale of these blasphemous 
 wretches under a similar invocation of the Deity. 
 
 I can also discover " blasphemy" in that cruel 
 and unaccountable adherence to the punishment of 
 death, against the united opinions of the theoretical 
 philanthropist and the practical thief-catcher, by 
 which such numbers of unprepared souls are hurried 
 into futurity; and in the system of those who, 
 while they are annually increasing the bulk of our 
 penal code, have done scarcely any thing for its 
 revision, and nothing for the promotion of a 
 national scheme of education, which is, in fact, the 
 only effective prevention of crime. "The ancient 
 wisdom of the best times did always make a just 
 complaint, that states were too busy with their laws, 
 and too negligent in point of education." 
 
 I shall detect "blasphemy" in the intermeddling 
 of the Clergy with secular affairs, contrary to that 
 solemn vow made at their ordination, to give them- 
 selves " wholly to their vocation." Thou cannot
 
 44 
 
 worship God and Mammon. And I shall again 
 discover it in the encouragement given to their 
 worldly lusts, by filling up the quorum and magis- 
 tracy from the clerical body : by imposing on them 
 the ungracious task of dispensing common law, an 
 office naturally thankless in the eyes of the people, 
 and peculiarly opposed to the charity and passive 
 virtues of what should be the character of the 
 Christian minister; an employment which wastes 
 that time which it steals from visiting the poor, 
 the sick, and the dying, on the mysteries of Burn's 
 Justice, now become more necessary than the study 
 and explanation of the Bible; which perplexes 
 them with the inconsistency of praying for the 
 safety of their flocks on the Sunday, and committing 
 them to prison for a violation of the Game Laws 
 on Monday ; which has notoriously made the 
 clerical character an object of political and personal 
 antipathy in every village throughout the country; 
 and which has associated with the library of his 
 parsonage-house feelings appropriate only to the 
 purlieus of Bow Street. Ye professors of the 
 gospel, who thus commit adultery with the world, 
 read that epistle of the Gentile Apostle to the 
 Corinthian Church, whose deacons he counselled : 
 " If then ye have judgments of things pertaining to 
 this life, set them to judge who are least esteemed 
 in the church." And if the Secretary of State for 
 the Home Department reads his Bible, as he pro-
 
 45 
 
 fesses, mark the insult he thus offers, in thus point- 
 ing you out as the " least esteemed in the 
 church ! " 
 
 I shall again detect a glaring blasphemy in those 
 who employed a British Clergyman in a late 
 dispersion, and killing, and maiming of the people 
 in directing and overlooking it, in defiance of 
 Christ's warning to his disciple, " Peter, put up 
 again thy sword into its place : for all they that 
 take the sword shall perish with the sword ! " a 
 " blasphemy," in violation of all those practices of 
 the primitive church, the professors of which would 
 not even witness public executions, or even gladia- 
 torial shows, lest, as Theophilus says, " they should 
 become partakers of the murders committed 
 there*." And yet this pseudo-political Christian 
 
 * Tertullian, who may be mentioned next in order of time, 
 strongly condemned the practice of bearing arms. - I shall give one 
 or two extracts from him on this subject. In his dissertation " on 
 the Worship of Idols," he says : " Though the soldiers came to John, 
 and received a certain form to be observed, and though the centurion 
 believed, yet Jesus Christ, by disarming Peter, disarmed every 
 soldier afterward : for custom never sanctions an unlawful act." 
 And in his " Soldier's Garland/' he says, " Can a soldier's life be 
 lawful, when Christ has pronounced that he who lives by the sword 
 shall perish by the sword ? Can one, who professes the peaceable 
 doctrines of the gospel, be a soldier, when it is his duty not so much 
 as to go to law? And shall he, who is not to revenge his own 
 wrongs, be instrumental in bringing others into chains, imprison- 
 ment, torment, death ? 
 
 Cyprian, in his Epistle to Donatus, takes a view of such customs 
 in his own times, as he conceived to be repugnant to the spirit or 
 the letter of the gospel. In looking at war, which was one of them,
 
 46 
 
 minister is rewarded with the emoluments of the 
 Establishment ! He is not, I presume, so steeled 
 to shame as to pretend to cure the bodies of the 
 laity, whatever empirical receipts he may have for 
 the diseases of their souls. There is still another 
 sample of" blasphemy'"' to be produced from this 
 quarter; namely, that spiritual polygamy which 
 grasps pluralities and commendams, among those 
 non-resident absentees, who, undertaking to feed 
 the flock of Christ, carry the tenth of its food away, 
 and grudge it even the benefit of their personal 
 example as a pattern of virtue, never giving a 
 thought to the exhortation of Peter, " Feed the 
 flock of God which is among you, taking the over- 
 sight thereof, not by constraint, but willingly ; not 
 for filthy lucre, but of a ready mind ; neither as 
 
 he speaks thus : " Suppose thyself," says he, " with me on the top 
 of some very exalted eminence, and from thence looking down upon 
 the appearances of things below. Let our prospect take in the 
 whole horizon, and let us view, with the indifference of persons not 
 concerned in them, the various motions and agitations of human 
 life. Thou wilt then, I dare say, have a real compassion for the 
 circumstances of mankind, and for the posture in which this view 
 will represent them. And when thou reflectest upon thy condition, 
 thy thoughts will rise in transports of gratitude and praise to God, 
 for having made thy escape from the pollutions of the world. The 
 things thou wilt principally observe will be, the highways beset with 
 robbers, the seas with pirates, encampments, marches, and all the 
 terrible forms of war and bloodshed. When a single murder is 
 committed, it shall be deemed, perhaps, a crime ; but that crime shall 
 commence a virtue, when committed under the shelter of public 
 authority, so that punishment is not rated by the measure of guilt, 
 but the more enormous the size of the wickedness is, so much the 
 greater is the chance of impunity."
 
 47 
 
 / 
 
 being lords over God's heritage, but being ensarn- 
 ples to his flock." 1 Ep. v. 2. 
 
 I can trace irreligion in that bigoted adhesion to 
 a system which excludes Catholics and Protestant 
 Dissenters from the public Universities, so impolitic 
 towards the interests of the Establishment, and so 
 glaringly unjust towards the Catholic, whose an- 
 cestors founded and endowed those colleges, and 
 whose advantages they bequeathed to their posterity, 
 solemnly sanctioned by acts of parliament ; a 
 bigotry which (as if the various characters of 
 men's minds, the passions and frailty of most, the 
 self-love, pride, and vain conceit of our own opinions, 
 common to all as if the constant and intimate 
 acquaintance with men and books of our own pre- 
 conceived opinions, the avoidance of all writers 
 and persons differing from us as if all these 
 unavoidable causes of dissension and error were not 
 sufficient to set mankind by the ears) endeavours, 
 by operation of law, to widen these natural breaches 
 of charity, and perpetuate ignorance, by pounding 
 up the Conformist in his own stagnant opinions, 
 and by driving the Dissenters to their narrow 
 seminaries of dogmatical education, where they 
 learn to riddle and sublimate truth : thus opposing 
 that quick circulation and collision of the products 
 of different minds, which the whole history of 
 human nature proves to encourage the spread of 
 knowledge, and the consequent increase of virtue.
 
 48 
 
 How much zeal has thus been lost to the Christian 
 church, and how much festering uncharity has been 
 engendered, it would be difficult to estimate, and 
 scarcely possible to credit. 
 
 The same " blasphemy" is discernible in those civil 
 disabilities for conscience sake, so abhorrent to the 
 genius of Christianity, and which cast on it the flagrant 
 disgrace of having left the rights of mankind in a 
 worse condition than it found them ; a blasphemy, 
 which builds up again those partition walls that 
 Christ broke down, when he gave to the world a 
 revelation, making no difference of people, tribe, or 
 nation ; but, in the all-comprehensive language of 
 the apostle, excluding " neither Greek nor Jew, 
 circumcision nor uncircurncision, barbarian,Scythian, 
 bond nor free; but all are one in Christ Jesus." 
 No species of bigotry is a greater outrage on the 
 spirit of revelation. Locke, the real friend of the 
 Establishment in church and state, truly says : " The 
 boundaries on both sides are fixed and immoveable. 
 He jumbles heaven and earth together, the things 
 most remote and opposite, who mixes these two 
 societies, which in their original, end, business, and 
 in every thing, are perfectly distinct and infinitely 
 different from each other *." Christianity deserves 
 the countenance and support of the state; but the 
 belief of the majority of a country may be treated 
 
 * First Letter on Toleration.
 
 40 
 
 as the system of the national church, sanctioned 
 and adopted by the state, without any disabilities, 
 being politic or just towards those who dissent from 
 its forms or doctrines. That which is the distinctive 
 character of the Christian revelation, as opposed to 
 air human impostures which constitutes its most 
 irrefutable evidence is its capacity of adaptation 
 (so to speak) to all nations and all ages of the 
 world : but if speculative opinions are to be the,' 
 tests of our attachment to our native country, and. 
 of our capacity for civil office, what a curse has the 
 Deity sent among us ; and if every one who dissents 
 from the ceremony or particular doctrine of a 
 church, is to be robbed of the honourable title of 
 Christian, what becomes of the argument founded 
 on the universal spread of our religion? No; 
 Christianity meddles not with the forms and models 
 of civil government; but leaves them as it finds 
 them, to be made suitable to the law of nature, and 
 to the genius and welfare of the People to which 
 they belong. It accords with the law of nature, 
 discountenancing despotism and anarchy it can 
 live under all forms of civil policy it flourishes in 
 every soil and climate, and blossoms with equal 
 beauty in the torrid and the frigid zone. It forbids 
 tumults, seditions, conspiracies, and massacres, 
 whether originating with the people or their govern* 
 rnents. It demands rule according to the law from 
 Kings, and rational allegiance in the People, It
 
 50 
 
 commands prayer for the afflicted, and especially 
 for the sinner, that the Lord would turn his heart 
 from wickedness. This is the catholic spirit of 
 Christianity. 
 
 I shall again, therefore, discover " blasphemy" 
 in the instruments selected for these anti-christian 
 bigotries : in the base prostitution of the Lord's 
 supper, that sacred emblem of concord, that holy 
 legacy of Christ to the whole Christian community, 
 as the test of eligibility to civil office, and the 
 sacrilegious food of a devouring appetite for sinecure 
 and place the abandoned profanation of the type 
 of love as the black flag of hatred. " For as oft 
 as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do show 
 the Lord's death till he come. Wherefore, whoso- 
 ever shall eat this bread and drink this cup of the 
 Lord unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and 
 blood of the Lord. But let a man examine himself, 
 and so let him eat of this bread, and drink of that 
 cup." (1 Cor. xi. 26*.) A prostitution which, after 
 all, cannot accomplish its end; for it may make 
 hypocrites, and cannot make converts ; it may keep 
 out the honest and the scrupulous, but cannot scare 
 the apostate or the perjurer; and is, therefore, a 
 mere bounty on hypocrisy ; making the Church of 
 England like Noah's ark, a place for the clean and 
 the unclean, binding us in " the unity of spirit and 
 the bond of duplicity." No barrier of this sort has 
 ever impeded base ambition, from the time when
 
 51 
 
 the see of Rome waxed wealthy, and Praeitextatus, 
 its Pagan prefect, is reported to have said, " Make 
 me a Bishop of Rome, and I will be a Christian 
 too:" and when, as Father Paul writes, " the 
 spiritual part was forgot, and nothing but the profits 
 regarded." This is the " blasphemy," * 
 
 " Which binding polity in spiritual chains, 
 And tainting piety with temporal stains, 
 Corrupts both state and church, and makes an oath 
 The knave and Atheist's passpozt into both *." 
 
 I shall discover " blasphemy" in that policy which 
 makes religion the kept mistress and strumpet of 
 the " Holy Alliance" which struck out of our 
 public prayers the name of a reputed sinner without 
 trial or inquest, in the teeth of Christian principles, 
 which command us to offer up more frequent and 
 earnest prayers for the wandering sinner which 
 thus holds up Christianity to the scorn and scoff of 
 those who represent it as a mere state machine of 
 bad governments which makes the Church of 
 England a paste-board house built of court cards, 
 and its liturgies prayers for kings, queens, and 
 knaves; a policy which exhibits Christianity as 
 the shuttlecock of nominal Christians, who, because 
 
 * The ancients appear to have had their conscience-salve in the 
 same mental reservations of the modern Jesuit: 
 
 *H y\<B<r<r' ofjitafjio^ , Si <f ;>iv ava>fjiTOt. 
 " My tongue has sworn, but not my mind." 
 
 EURIPID. Hippol. 1. 612.
 
 52 
 
 they have read or believe the history of Jesus 
 Christ, conceive themselves practising his morals ; 
 and who, in the words of Bishop Fell, " can 
 give no better account of the swaddling clothes of 
 their .infancy, and why they took upon them 
 Christ's livery, than that they wear such garments 
 as the common fashion of their country prescribes 
 them." 
 
 I shall discover " blasphemy" in that nest of 
 rats, who, having turned their backs upon them- 
 selves," having deserted all their " early predilec- 
 tions," are now quoted, by an Irish viscount, as 
 the disinterested witnesses to his patriotism and 
 wisdom ! I can see " blasphemy" in these political 
 fornicators, who barter away the liberties of their 
 country for blue ribands, garters, and knighthood ; 
 and who, by the rabid virulence with which they 
 defame the friends they have deserted, seek to raise 
 themselves in their own sunken estimation ; who are 
 indeed (like Dr. Slop) genuine Jacobins ; and whose 
 fury for their present opinions can only be compared 
 with the violence of their former tenets. Thus it is 
 that vicious zeal throws up its combustion : and, as 
 in the case of the sons of Zebedee, when the ex- 
 plosion has spent itself, a fall ensues, like that which 
 befell Peter! 
 
 : ' 1 j l J- ' ' 
 
 " And loud and upright, till their price be known, 
 They thwart the King's supplies to raise their own."
 
 53 
 
 These are the men who, with vice imprinted on 
 their head, have brought shame and degradation on 
 the most learned and dignified profession of the 
 country, exhibiting it as a mere bank of apostasy, 
 where the drafts of the Treasury are duly honoured. 
 With what colouring of religion will ye white- 
 washers of " blasphemy" varnish over this matchless 
 turpitude of patricide? " We don't hear that Judas 
 knew the High Priests, till he came to do business 
 with them." But lest the coroner of Oldham 
 should record a verdict against me of " wilful 
 murder," under Lord Ellenborough's Act, " the 
 black act," I shall (in the Christian language of 
 Lord Russell to his enemies in court) pity them, 
 and wish them well ; and had rather that their own 
 consciences should reckon up the particulars wherein 
 they have sinned to which, and the mercies of 
 God, I leave them. Think not, reader, that I 
 honour them too much by believing in the existence 
 of conscience as any part of their composition ; I 
 earnestly hope that they have yet some portion of it 
 left that it will remain a mirror of adamant, 
 reflecting their sins, which no treachery can get rid 
 of a demon no man can cast out their prosecutor, 
 judge, jury, witness, and executioner ! 
 
 These, Sir, are a few of the real blasphemies of 
 the times. And if you wish further evidence of 
 zeal for religion and discountenance of blasphemy, 
 mark it in the vile seductions of lotteries and
 
 54 
 
 gin-shops those national decoys and preserves of 
 vice those snares and pimps for glutting the 
 severities of our penal code ; which are continued 
 in open defiance of every law, human and Divine, 
 to supply the unnecessary and profligate expenditure 
 of the State. 
 
 Such, Sir, are among the blasphemies of the 
 present day ; and putting the charge upon the 
 People is something like the impudence of the 
 pickpocket who turns on his pursuers with the cry 
 of f' Stop thief!" It reminds one of the devil 
 rebuking sin. If this is Religion, I will henceforth 
 glory in the distinction of infidel. The calumniators 
 of the People may understand Priestcraft, but 
 know little of Christianity : they care little for the 
 Constitution, however they may love the Common- 
 wealth. To deny that they belong to a Church, is 
 impossible ; but it is, as an old author says, in the 
 same sense as a jackdaw who builds his nest in the 
 steeple ; they hok up to a Church to the weather- 
 cock on its spire to discover how the wind blows, 
 and so to conform themselves. 
 
 Thus, Sir, I have exhibited to you facts ; and 
 facts which I hope will convince you, that whatever 
 may be the intention of our calumniators towards 
 Christianity, they are most unfortunate in its appli- 
 cation ; and never can I concede to them the 
 character of Religion, so long as the Bible forms the 
 rule of the Religion of Protestants, and a " Bill to
 
 55 
 
 revise, amend, or repeal certain obsolete statutes, 
 commonly called the Ten Commandments, " has not 
 received the assent of the successor of the tl Most 
 High and Mighty Prince, James, by the Grace of 
 God King of Great Britain, France and Ireland, 
 Defender of the Faith," &c. ; and so long as the 
 said Commandments are by Act of Parliament, and 
 " his Majesty's special command, appointed to be 
 read in Churches." 
 
 There is one other point, Sir, I shall but barely 
 allude to, as exhibiting proofs of the saving faith of 
 our Rulers : I mean the prosecution of her Majesty 
 the Queen, and the consequent deluge of obscene 
 and odious associations with vice to pollute the 
 minds of youth. So early as the time of Aristotle 
 it is noted, " That a lawgiver ought above all 
 things to banish all filthy discourse out of a city ; for 
 men easily go from saying filthy things to doing 
 them." This abomination cannot fail to aggravate 
 that dissoluteness, which is the deplorable evil of the 
 day, and the moral pestilence of female prostitution 
 which now stalks abroad, to the disgust of all good 
 men, and the degradation of England, and has 
 sufficient political cause for its existence,, without 
 quickening it with the addition of this scourging 
 plague. But lest I should be accused of appealing 
 to the feelings of the moment, 1 shall dismiss this 
 fruitful source of reproach, knowing that you your- 
 self, with a large majority of the " virtual" represen-
 
 56 
 
 tation of the People, represented to your Sovereign, 
 " that perseverance in these discussions could not 
 but be derogatory from the dignity of the Crown, 
 and injurious to the best interests of the People /" 
 With respect to the immoralities of the Press, I 
 am sure you will agree, that the shameless attacks 
 on private character which are every day practised 
 with impunity by the Treasury writers, towards all 
 those who oppose the Ministers, call for the detesta- 
 tion of every lover of truth. But think not I would 
 call down the vengeance of the law on even this 
 " filthy splashing of vulgar abuse." No; rather let it 
 fly the advertiser of its own impure origin. Yet, let 
 these calumniators reflect, that should their excesses 
 provoke a retaliation on private character, their game 
 is one at which two can play : the annals of the 
 Jockey Club and the gaming table, and the orgies 
 of Bacchus, will afford ample means. And though 
 the Courier daily posts the ladies of noble birth 
 who visit Brandenburgh House, it might prove an 
 awkward retort to spy out all the visitors of 
 Carlton House, the Cottage, and Pavilion; to 
 inquire into the times, the places, the purposes, and 
 repetitions of these visits ; to drop inuendoes and 
 suspicions against all who enter in at the gates. By 
 such vile conduct the exalted moral character of the 
 King himself his splendid virtues as a son, a 
 husband, a father, and a friend might be exposed 
 to the same slander, as the virtues of the Queen,
 
 5T 
 
 i ' 
 
 described by Mr. Canning " the life, the grace, 
 and the ornament of society." I am one of those, 
 Sir, who hold that the veil of mystery should 
 surround the private character of the Monarch. I 
 am not for dragging forward to public gaze the 
 frailties of Royalty, but had rather decently inter 
 them in the tomb of the Capulets. And while we 
 are on this subject, let it not be forgotten that the 
 character of a King is of far more import to the 
 morals of his subjects ; for " The higher a man's 
 birth is," says Juvenal, " the more exalted he is in 
 dignity, and the more enormous is the crime he 
 commits :" 
 
 " Omne animi vitium tanto conspectius in se 
 
 Crimea habet, quanto major qui peccat habetur*." 
 - weljKU .Y. :<.>;-'-} >< \' t iiJaJhw* *!} > 
 
 And let not Princes think they can escape this 
 obligation to purity of private character. Cicero 
 writes : " Nee enim tantum mali est peccare prin- 
 cipes, quamquam est magnum hoc per seipsum 
 malum; quantum illud, quod permulti imitatores 
 principium existunt : quo perniciosius de republica 
 merentur vitiosi principes, quod non solum vitia 
 concipiunt ipsi, sed ea infundunt in civitatem. 
 Neque solum obsunt, quod ipsi corrumpuntur, sed 
 etiam qu6d corrumpunt : plusque exemplo, quam 
 peccato, nocent." De Leg. lib. iii. c. 14. " This 
 takes place especially with respect to Princes, and so 
 
 * Sat. viiii
 
 58 
 
 much the more, because the consequences of their 
 bad actions are very fatal to the State, from the 
 great number of persons who endeavour to imitate 
 them." And though those " useful fictions" of the 
 law may pronounce that the King can do no wrong, 
 yet, with the Bishop of London's leave, there is a 
 tribunal and a time " when the Kings of the earth 
 shall stand before the judgment seat of GOD, and 
 when He will execute judgment on All, and of all 
 the hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken 
 against him*." 
 
 * The Bishop of London seems to have dived into the mysteries of 
 the law, and to have studied well the last edition of Blackstone's 
 Commentaries, with Mr. Christ ion's ultra-loyal notes: he appears vastly 
 impressed with the " attributes" of the Ring ascribed to him by the 
 fictions of the law ; with his " ubiquity," " immortality," and 
 " impeccability." " Besides the attribute of sovereignty, the law also 
 ascribes to the King, in his political capacity, absolute perfection. 
 The King can do no wrong." " The King, moreover, is not only 
 incapahje of doing wrong, but even of thinking wrong." Comm. 
 vol. i. c. 7. Being myself a student of the law, and suspecting the 
 Reverend Prelate of a too literal interpretation of the text, I may 
 perhaps be allowed a short commentary on this '* absolute wisdom" 
 and perfectibility. 
 
 Judge Fortescue, and all our constitutional writers of authority, lay 
 great stress on the limited nature of the English monarchy: indeed, 
 its original conformation was but a few removes from democracy. 
 The noble principles of freedom in the institutions of our Gothic 
 ancestors built up, in Parliaments and Juries, impregnable barriers 
 against regal despotism ; and our charters" are not grants from the 
 liberality of our Kings, but rather declaratory of liberties founded in 
 the common law, existing from time immemorial; and frequently forced 
 from despotic Princes, who had unconstitutionally usurped posses- 
 sion of them. The principle of the Constitution, that " ^he King can 
 do no wrong," so far from originating in despotic power, has the very 
 contrary implication ; it is expressly called by Fortescue impotency :
 
 59 
 
 One cannot but expose the hypocrisy of those 
 who bawl out the profanation of the sabbath by 
 
 " Sed propter privationes in adjecto" impotentia potius denominan- 
 dum." De Laudibus Legum Angtia, c. 14. All power originates 
 from and is held for the People, says that admirable writer. The 
 King was never trusted with the power of doing wrong. Ministers 
 were formerly held responsible to Parliament : Parliament being then 
 the real representation of the People, the law, supposing it would ever 
 remain so, held it impossible for a Ministry to commit an unconstitu- 
 tional act with impunity ; and, holding .the purse-strings, judged it 
 might safely grant a visionary inviolability to the King, as essentially 
 necessary to the exercise of his high prerogative : hence originated 
 the old saying" England can never be undone, but by her Parlia- 
 ment." How far this responsibility survives, or how far Parliament 
 is the representation of the People, see " Oldfield's History of 
 Boroughs.*' In the " Common wealth of England, by Sir Thomas Smith, 
 Secretary of Queen Elizabeth, 1601," I discover what it once was 
 
 " 3Tf>e BDarlement of ngIanB, represented, anfc Ijaty fyt potoer of 
 tfje to&ole Sealme, 60$ tije fjeali anli tfje boliie* jfor etoerg (Engltsl)* 
 man 10 mtenfceti to be tljere present, eitfjer tn person, or 62 procuration 
 antJ attorn^, of to&at pre-eminence, state, fcignitie, or qualiti* soetoer 
 e be, from tjje iprince, (be e King or S&ueen,) to tpe lotoest person 
 of nclanti+ 9nU tjje consent of t$e Parliement is ta&en to be etoere 
 
 man's consent! !" In justice, however, to his Grace of London, it 
 should be acknowledged, that he is not singular in this vulgar notion of 
 impeccability : I find that a Dr. Cartwright, (not the old Major,) Bishop 
 pf Chester, asserted in a sermon, " that the King's promises were free 
 donatiyes, and ought not to be too strictly examined or urged, and 
 that they must leave his Majesty to explain his own meaning in 
 them." Rapin, vol. ii. p. 754. 
 
 Bishop Warburton relates with some humour, in a Letter to Hurd, 
 a rebuke he received at a Royal L^vee, from an old courtier. Colonel 
 Robinson, for having the indecency to say he had heard that the King 
 (George II.) was not well. To which rebuke, says the Bishep, I 
 answered " I perceive then, Colonel, there is some difference between 
 your master and mine. Mine was subject to all human infirmities, 
 sin excepted : yours is subject to none, sin excepted." 
 
 There is an anecdote of Bishop Berkeley, the well-known author 
 pf the Metaphysical System of the Non-existence pf Matter, not
 
 60 
 
 Sunday newspapers, when it is notorious that legal 
 and royal business is transacted on a Sunday, and 
 that Cabinet dinners then hold their inquests over 
 the liberties of England. I well know the weight 
 of public business, so honourably accomplished by 
 the first lawyer who ever graced the woolsack ; but 
 
 altogether foreign to this subject. The Bishop contended, that sen- 
 sible material objects, as they are called, are not external to the 
 mind ; but exist in it, and are nothing more than impressions or 
 shadows made upon it by the immediate act of the Deity. In 1714, 
 he was seized with a violent fever ; and Dr. Arhuthuot, writing to 
 Swift, has a little pleasantry at the expense of the Bishop's imagina- 
 tion : " Poor philosopher Berkeley has now the idea of health, what 
 was very hard to produce in him; for he had an idea of a strange 
 fever on him so strong, that it was very hard to destroy it by intro- 
 ducing a contrary one." 
 
 I have before expressed myself that there is a respect due to the 
 chief magistrate of the country, without which no government can be 
 maintained. " But this I can defend, without being of opinion, that 
 Kings came down from Heaven with crowns upon their heads, and 
 the People were all born with saddles on their backs : I own I arn 
 none of Issachar's asses, nor should I be willing to be governed by 
 the Czar of Muscovy : I don't think, if a King wanted to walk across 
 a dirty highway, his Majesty might command twenty or thirty of the 
 heads of his followers to be cut off, to make steppings for his sacred 
 shoes : I profess myself a dutiful subject to the Crown of England, 
 and in that word I mean, to what head soever on which the Parlia- 
 ment of England shall place the crown ; but I own no King who 
 shall ever wear it without consent of Parliament, no King who shall, 
 after such consent, employ the power of it to the destruction of the 
 law and Constitution of the nation ; who shall invade the property 
 of the subject, invert the public justice, or overthrow the religion 
 and liberty of England. Such a prince is a tyrant, and may be de- 
 poted by the same power that placed him on the throne ; and here- 
 ditary succession, pretended divine right, supreme power, or other 
 matter, cause, or thing, to the contrary in any wise notwithstanding." 
 Preface to DE FOE'S Jure Divino. That admirable poem and 
 satire is now almost lost in the dust and neglect of the book stalls ;
 
 we are not to be crocodiled out of our Christian 
 liberty by a Levite, who thinks there is one law for 
 the rich and another for the poor : and, perhaps, it 
 would give much relief to the learned Lord alluded 
 to, and make his Sunday more a day of rest, if he, 
 who seems so encumbered with his own conscience, 
 were eased of that fiction of law which imposes upon 
 him the keeping the King's; and were relieved of 
 the inconsistency of giving judgment in the House 
 of Peers on appeals from his own Court : he might 
 also be relieved from the task of issuing polite 
 conges d'e'lire, in addition to the labour of dispensing 
 secular law, and thus be better enabled to attend to 
 his legislative duties : I cannot help suspecting both 
 the law of God and man would be better tended. 
 But, at all events, let us not receive these rebukes 
 
 but having been one of the main props of the Revolution, I will close 
 this long note with a short extract, for the benefit of those foreign 
 members of the " Holy Alliance" who are now so zealously uphold- 
 ing legitimacy. 
 
 .uifj?! ' ' "^Nri'vl Ef V ! \.' 
 
 " But Kings are Gods ! that title own they must, 
 
 Like him be sacred, and like him be just; 
 If o'er the last the vicious lust prevails, 
 The sanction dies, and all the Godhead fails; 
 His high deserts a jest, a ridicule, 
 And he 's more vile than those he ought to rule ; 
 Abandon'd to his crimes, he ought to find 
 Himself abandon'd too by all mankind : 
 With the Assyrian Monarch turn'd to grass, 
 As much a tyrant, and as much an ass ; 
 I know no meaner, abject, monstrous thing, 
 n exalted Devil made a King."
 
 62 
 
 from those who rarely behold the interior of a 
 church, except to qualify for place or pension, and 
 to avoid the clutches of the informer; who are 
 thus frugal of their public devotions apprehensive, 
 I presume, of that reflection on the Pharisees of 
 old, that they spare their prayers at home, to the 
 end that they may be liberal in public. Thank 
 God, the decency, order, and pious observance of 
 Sunday by the People needs not the confirmation 
 of the court newsman, or the Mirror of Fashion in 
 the Chronicle. I happen to know of a legal apos- 
 tate, one of the last solicited, who was enticed into 
 the trap at one of the Cabinet feasts of the Pass-over 
 above alluded to ; and this cant of sabbatical pro- 
 fanation brought to my mind the story of a loose 
 woman, who wrote to the Pope a case of conscience 
 whether she was obliged to execute her cat for 
 killing a rat on a Sunday ! 
 
 Thus, Sir, have I brought blasphemy home : and 
 if a Bishop, on his road from Exeter to Lincoln, 
 spoke the truth, when he is reported to have said, 
 that the devil was abroad among the People ; I 
 think I have shown that he walks on both sides the 
 road ; and 
 
 " Bad as he is, the Devil may be abus'd, 
 Be falsely charged, and causelessly accused, 
 When men, unwilling to be blam'd alone, 
 Shift off those crimes on him which are their own." 
 
 One of the most pregnant evils of the really cor- 
 rupt Press, is, that the principles of the Revolution,
 
 63 
 
 which placed the present family on the throne, are 
 daily slandered and denied, in senseless commenda- 
 tion of the battles of Peterloo and Bonny Muir. 
 Every petty pilfering of a mob is dignified with the 
 name of treason, and the right of resisting tyrants 
 confounded with the crime of sedition. As ultra- 
 loyalty is busy, it may not be amiss to quote those 
 sentiments of Sidney, (written long before theGuelphs 
 were even heard of) which promoted that ..royal 
 family from Hanover to St. James ; and they are 
 quoted without the slightest reference to the present 
 times, but to preserve the recollection of wholesome 
 truths : " 'Tis ill that men should kill one another 
 in seditions, tumults, and wars; but 'tis worse to 
 bring nations to such misery, weakness, and base- 
 ness, as to have neither strength nor courage to con- 
 tend for any thing ; to have nothing left worth de- 
 fending, and to give the name of peace to desola- 
 tion. I take Greece to have been happy and glo- 
 rious, when it was full of populous cities, flourishing 
 in all the arts that deserve praise among men : when 
 they were courted and feared by the greatest kings, 
 and never assaulted by any but to his own loss and 
 confusion : when Babylon and Susa trembled at the 
 motion of their arms ; and their valour exercised in 
 these wars and tumults, which our author looks 
 upon as the greatest evils, was raised to such a 
 power that nothing upon earth was found able to 
 resist them : and I think it now miserable, when
 
 64 
 
 peace reigns within their empty walls, and the poor 
 remains~of those exhausted nations, sheltering them- 
 selves under the ruins of the desolated cities, have 
 neither any thing that deserves to be disputed among 
 them, nor spirit nor force to repel the injuries 
 they daily suffer from a proud and insupportable 
 monster*/' 
 
 Such are the immutable truths, and the memor- 
 able lessons, taught by history. And, says a Greek 
 writer, " After treating of our duty to the gods, it 
 is proper to teach that which we owe to our country. 
 For our country is, as it were, a secondary god, and 
 the first and greatest parent. It is to be preferred 
 to parents, wives, : children, friends, and all things, 
 the gods only excepted : and if our country perishes, 
 it is as impossible to save an individual, as to pre- 
 serve one of the fingers of a mortified hand." 
 
 ** O FREEDOM ! sovereign boon of Heav'n ! 
 Great charter with our being giv'n ! 
 
 For which the patriot and the sage 
 
 - I|f: ' TT M k ki A , " - : 'i l ''*'* 
 
 Have plann d, have bled, Inro every age : 
 
 High privilege of human race, 
 Beyond a mortal monarch's grace !" 
 
 jSi'U.t JttJJlJ*J .. i f\> i J.ITjj 1} li'j: ; 
 
 I am, Sir, 
 
 jdJ JB L ,. r . AU ... ^ 
 
 With the highest respect, 
 
 in to&io'oxp io. -j ; / 'uo; ^:ti-:/i % .Jcru 
 
 Your obedient Servant and Fellow- Christian, 
 
 CHRISTOPHILUS. 
 
 . ( ( ' , f - ; '. .jj.... ,{ ijrt . i . x. 
 
 * Discourses on Government, Sect. XXVI. Civil wars arid tumults 
 hot the greatest evils that cnn befall nations.
 
 y.'3?3; ! j to ^*l':*3 hfJ9 HTKJ t t f fff Off j 'to 
 
 LETTER IV. 
 
 AS TO THE REAL QUANTITY AND QUALITY OF THE 
 "BLASPHEMY" WHICH ACTUALLY HAS GONE FORTH 
 TO THE PEOPLE THROUGH THE MEDIUM OF THE 
 PRESS; WHAT MEANS HAVE BEEN USED BY THESE 
 MINISTERS FOR ITS DISCOVERY AND SUPPRESSION ; 
 AND A BRIEF CONTRAST OF ITS AMOUNT WITH 
 THE AMAZING MASS OF RELIGIOUS PUBLICATION 
 IN THE SAME PERIOD. 
 
 To William Wilberforce, Esq. 
 
 tl Some generals of old have endeavoured to take towns by 
 treachery, by corrupting some of the garrison ; and they have 
 done it several ways. Some have sent of their own men 
 as fugitives into the town, thereby to put them into credit 
 and authority with the enemy, and give them opportunity to 
 betray them. Some by this means have discovered the 
 strength of the garrison, and by that discovery have taken 
 the town. -- Nicholas Machiarel's Art of War, chap. vii. To 
 corrupt a garrison, and take it by treachery. 
 
 :> ' hii .". [.:t-~i'~'.i"iL'.' f ,'V ';. if ftVhti 2 rroi::iTu>r> ! off! ;.i 
 SIR, I have before admitted the existence of 
 irreligious publications to a certain extent; and I 
 had almost said that I did not regret their existence, 
 for the sake of the striking contrast they afford 
 to the cotemporaneous zeal, for the support of 
 Christianity. The comparative insignificancy also 
 
 F
 
 of the numbers and effect of these publications, 
 proves the distaste of the public mind for infidelity 
 more incontestably than could have been effected in 
 any other way. There are, however, very peculiar 
 circumstances attending what I should term their 
 forced circulation ; for certain I am, that no appear- 
 ances warranted even a suspicion that they were 
 welcome in any corner of the kingdom. 
 
 You cannot, Sir, be ignorant, that insinuating 
 infidelity through the medium of the political press 
 is one of the deepest arts of political craft. The 
 minister of the day has not a more true or useful 
 friend, than the fiend who takes advantage of 
 popular irritation to propagate irreligion. It not 
 only blights the spirit and effect of all opposition 
 to his schemes, but it causes that defection from the 
 ranks of his opponents, which must be produced 
 whenever means are afforded of creating alarm ; 
 and originates the most effective class of ministerial 
 supporters, well known in the political vocabulary 
 under the designation of Alarmists. The Religious 
 Public will naturally sink their political differences 
 in the common support of Christianity. And a 
 large portion of them, unused to the freedom of 
 speculative and philosophical research, are inclined 
 to accede to restrictions on the press, which, though 
 apparently tending to stay the plague, do but in 
 reality increase it. It is not, however, here my 
 intention to discuss the remedies of irreligion. I
 
 67 
 
 , --y "jo * - 
 
 shall briefly, therefore, call your attention to the 
 circumstances which have made political knowledge 
 an object of greater interest than in the last century. 
 First of all, instructing the people in reading and 
 writing would naturally beget a more extensive 
 curiosity and interest in the public conduct of their 
 affairs. To this may be added the awful and 
 alternate changes of warfare, in which scarcely a 
 single cottage in the kingdom has escaped the loss 
 of some inmate. The financial difficulties attending 
 those wars, and the consequent variation in the 
 demand for labour, have necessarily subjected the 
 poor to great deprivations and sufferings ; and it is 
 well known, that ever since the American and 
 French revolutions, there has existed an increasing 
 avidity for political information. An extraordinary 
 manufacturing system has collected together large 
 masses of artisans, whose knowledge and ingenuity 
 are scarcely credible to those who, never merging 
 beyond the purlieus of Downing Street, are totally 
 ignorant of the real state of the country, except 
 from the information gathered from such pure 
 sources as a Castles, an Oliver, or an Edwards. 
 The growing sense and influence of religion among 
 these large classes of the community was, until the 
 last four years, universally acknowledged. In a 
 preceding Letter I have sufficiently exposed the 
 imputation of " blasphemy," with which they are 
 now visited.
 
 63 
 
 I need not, however, go further back for a 
 cation of the People, than to the middle of the year 
 1817, when the speech from the throne, as before 
 quoted, which was delivered by the Regent in 
 person, declared : " I have the satisfaction of re- 
 ceiving the most decisive proofs of the loyalty and 
 public spirit of the great body of the people; and 
 the patience with which they have sustained the 
 most severe temporary distress, cannot be too 
 highly commended." I need not enter into the 
 details of the green bag, the A. B. C. protocols, or 
 the enactment of the six acts ; but certain it is, that 
 up to the close of 1817, blasphemy was scarcely 
 heard of. Whatever political sins Mr. Cobbett or 
 Mr. Wppler might have to answer for, to change 
 the religion of the people seemed no part of their 
 object: indeed, every politician who writes for 
 popular effect well knows the impossibility of 
 meddling to any purppse with religion in a country 
 where it is of various growth, and where the people 
 are divided into such deeprrooted sects and opinions, 
 The disinterred bones of " Tom" Paine were never 
 exhibited as relics of blasphemy, but only as the 
 remains of a political saint. 
 
 The parodies of Mr. Hone were the first war- 
 whoop of the Ministry. His trial and acquittal are 
 fresh in your recollection ; and though Mr. Hone 
 defended his right of using religious forms of wcyr ; 
 ship as the vehicle of political parody all other
 
 69 
 
 parties, high and low, having done the same yet, 
 by discontinuing the sale of these parodies before 
 any information had been filed against him, he 
 obviated in a great measure the necessity of aay 
 prosecution made the only reparation in his 
 power, by suppressing them, in deference to public 
 opinion and was finally acquitted by three different 
 juries of his countrymen, on the ground that his 
 intent had no more to do with blasphemy than 
 Mahometanism. I mention these facts, Sir, as 
 due to the character of Mr. Hone; because, 
 through his whole life connected with the press, he 
 neither before nor since, ever in any way connected 
 himself with that department of publication. 
 
 Now then, Sir, came forward the real author of 
 the " blasphemy," who appeared and disappeared 
 from the political atmosphere under such extraor- 
 dinary circumstances as call for the most marked 
 attention. 
 
 At the close of 1817, W. T. SHERVVIN, 
 utterly unknown to the political press of the metro- 
 polis, first advertised and placarded a weekly pub- 
 lication, The Republican ; but soon discovering this 
 was not after the " taste of the present age," it was 
 quickly metamorphosed into " Sherwin's Political 
 Register." Now, mark, Sir ; in a year of unprece- 
 dented political prosecution no notice was taken of 
 this herald of sedition ! The walls were placarded 
 with the pith of his lucubrations ; he weekly and
 
 70 
 
 openly advocated a change of government, from the 
 monarchy to a republic ; he printed, published, and 
 personally sold, in a little hole in Fleet Street, 
 (No. 183,) these publications, and ultimately pro- 
 moted and established Carlile as his publisher. 
 Carlile, this mere jackall of the tiger, was originally 
 a journeyman tinker, ignorant and illiterate even in 
 the commonest details of vulgar knowledge, who 
 had been a distributor of The Register, but who 
 now became the convenient scape-goat of his em- 
 ployer. Their first joint production was a reprint 
 of the parodies Mr. Hone had suppressed. An 
 ex-officio information was filed against Carlile, but 
 never tried. The Register proceeded ; the same 
 flagrant attempts to push radicalism into repub- 
 licanism; open and undisguised attacks on all the 
 forms and principles of Christianity ; exhortations 
 to the devilish crime of assassination; engravings 
 and descriptions given of those very pikes for the 
 possession and use of which so many houses of the 
 poor were searched, and for the use of which one 
 misguided Scotchman forfeited his life to the offended 
 laws of his country ; the reprint of Colonel Titus's 
 " Killing no Murder," with the name of Sherwin as 
 the printer, and sold in his scape-goat's shop. Then 
 followed the reprint of Paine's " Rights of Man," a 
 work which the most extravagant opinion for the 
 liberty of the Press could not justify, in a country 
 where the monarchial form has so long and so glo-
 
 71 
 
 piously existed, and in the preservation of which all 
 orders of society are alike interested. Emboldened 
 with the impunity of a six months' circulation, the 
 " Age of Reason" was then printed and publicly 
 offered for sale. And by the ill-gotten gains arising 
 from this scandalous neglect of the exercise of the 
 law, the scene of publication was removed to " The 
 Temple of Reason," No. 55 in Fleet Street, where 
 the public were for a year insulted by exhibitions in 
 the windows^ such as had never before escaped im- 
 mediate prosecution. On the dispersion of the 
 Manchester meeting, a direct and unequivocal ex- 
 hortation to treason and revolt was written with the 
 signature of Mr. Sherwin, and printed by him : the 
 People were then supposed to be ripened to a re- 
 quisite excitement. W. T. Sherwin retired from 
 the editorship of The Register, to enjoy the well- 
 earned fruits of his patriotism resigning the con- 
 tinuation of his labours into the hands of his wretched 
 dupe ! Then, Sir, was Carlile brought to trial, and 
 delivered over to the vengeance of the law, after a 
 two years' impunity of blasphemy, during which no 
 single week had elapsed when he would not have me- 
 rited and received a verdict of " guilty of blasphemy 
 and sedition" from any jury in any part of the 
 country. 
 
 It has been said that this arch-blasphemer, Mr. 
 Sherwin, could not be made amenable to the law, 
 from his cunning avoidance of all vending and pub-
 
 72 
 
 lishing. But, Sir, it is notorious that he lived near 
 Islington possessed printing presses employed 
 several journeymen weekly accounted with Carlile 
 for profit and loss daily sent trucks and cart-loads 
 of his printing from his private residence to Fleet 
 Street made no secret of his avocations to many 
 persons in London ; and is there a human being 
 who will deny that one quarter per cent of the 
 money lavished on Oliver, Castles, and Edwards, 
 would not have purchased one spy to convict this 
 midnight owl, as the author, and printer, and pro- 
 prietor, of these base attempts to corrupt the minds 
 of the People ? Not only was this open to the law 
 officers of the crown; but Ed wards, that well-known 
 compositor in the Cato Street conspiracy, was almost 
 daily in Carlile's shop, lodged opposite to him, 
 wormed himself into his confidence, actually moulded 
 and cast the figure of Paine, so prominent in the 
 shop, was the maker of the little images hawked 
 about the streets, and daily possessed himself of 
 what was coming in and going out ! Yet Mr. 
 Sherwin, his weekly visitor, was permitted to 
 escape; and with his honest industry has opened 
 an establishment in a respectable part of the city, 
 adorned with religious books on " grace," and 
 baptism, and Shakspeare's plays, " All's well that 
 ends well ! " congratulating himself on his ingenious 
 extrication ! and, perhaps, often flattering himself 
 that he is not the late Mr. Sherwin, of Fleet Street.
 
 73 
 
 What process of adult baptism has converted and 
 regenerated this child of grace? and by what minis- 
 ter was he confirmed? 
 
 I put it to the feeling of every man who loves his 
 country, his religion, and his laws, whether this 
 culpable neglect of the law can be justified ? These 
 facts are notorious to hundreds in London ; and I 
 ask any man, whether the application of the law in 
 the first instance would not have prevented all that 
 subsequently occurred for three years ? 
 
 Sir, it is at all times a violation of our best feel- 
 ings to drag private character before a public ordeal: 
 but one who has acted so public a character can 
 have no pretensions to so premature a retirement. 
 What security have we, Sir, that this insidious 
 apostle of " blasphemy" will not renew his apostolic 
 missions on similar opportunities? Sir, I think you 
 are bound, by your professed love of religion, to urge 
 a Parliamentary investigation of this mysterious 
 subject. I conceive Ministers bound, by their pro- 
 fessed abhorrence of " blasphemy and sedition," to 
 assist you in this investigation : it is a sacred obli- 
 gation due to the injured character of the People; 
 and if Ministers do not yield every possible assist- 
 ance, the unavoidable inference must be, that " blas- 
 phemy" is a most useful ingredient in the political 
 cauldron, where the system of a new and doubtless 
 improved liberty is concocting. If this Mr. Sherwin 
 be a penitent, let him make a public confession of his
 
 74 
 
 sins : if still abiding in his iniquities, let the State 
 do her duty to repress them. An imperious sense 
 of duty, Sir, on my part, has urged this public cita- 
 tion; for it cannot be endured, that, for the sake of 
 an individual, the People should rest quiet under 
 the bitter calumnies heaped with no sparing hand 
 upon them, in this their day of burden and reproach. 
 I know nothing of this self-dubbed Patriot and 
 Reformer, of his origin or pursuits, except from the 
 murmuring whispers which an ear not willingly shut 
 may easily hear; and I have, therefore, studiously 
 confined myself to facts of public notoriety. 
 
 Thus, Sir, I have exposed to you the sole and 
 polluted source of this exaggerated " blasphemy," 
 which has, after all, disseminated only a few paltry 
 reprints of Palmer, Diderot, Voltaire, Volney, 
 Paine, and often-refuted and long-forgotten English 
 sceptics in the total, I will venture to say, not 
 amounting to the sale of Dr. Chalmers's volume on 
 the Evidences of Christianity. And, with respect 
 to the class of society amongst whom this miserable 
 trash has circulated, if we deduct the portion sold to 
 the curious and speculative men in the higher and 
 more educated ranks, a remnant only remains for the 
 lower classes of society, which, compared \yith the 
 innumerable religious publications monthly and 
 annually dispensed to the people, is but as a grain of 
 sand to the myriads of the sea shore. Sir, I write 
 from correct and thorough information now before
 
 75 
 
 me; and I affirm, that there cannot be a more 
 monstrous falsehood, than this blasphemous taste 
 imputed to the people. It contradicts the most 
 notorious facts and the most evident character of the 
 times : and you, Sir, well know that it is asserted* 
 by the very same men who prefer the charge of 
 infidelity, that there is an increase of evangelical 
 religion. You know that, both in the church and 
 out of it, the latter tenets are discouraged by the 
 present Ministry, and that excess of Methodism is 
 the fear of their minds. You well know, that from 
 the first accession of the Dundas influence up to the 
 present moment, evangelical religion has been 
 opposed in Scotland, and all preferment withheld 
 from its professors : you know that the " wild men" 
 have been snubbed, and the moderates advanced*. 
 
 * I cannot refrain from noticing here, as part of the same system, a 
 circumstance which lately excited great disgust in a midland county. 
 A certain nameless apostate, well known as the Guilford Rat, lately 
 informed an unfortunate female criminal, that as he could not hold out 
 to her any hope in this world, so he took the opportunity of intimating 
 to her, that in his opinion she had little to expect in another and 
 that the wild and visionary opinions of the vulgar Christianity would 
 sadly disappoint her reliance on them ! I thought of the following 
 passage in Bishop Fell: " It is indeed to be wished we would cease 
 to invade God's peculiar, by judging those that must stand or fall to 
 him : but if we will needs take his office, it is but equitable we take 
 bis rulers too ; and in our wrath remember mercy: But God be 
 blessed, it is the judgment of our upright, yet gracious Master, that 
 shall finally determine us ; and not that of our passionate fellow- 
 servants : if these were irreversible, and the key of the bottomless pit 
 were in our custody, we might give Satan a Writ of Ease, discharge 
 him from his perambulations ; he would need no more to walk about as 
 a Lion, but might still lie in his den ; and we should bring in prey 
 enough to glut the devourer : for could we execute all we condemn, we 
 njihf, as the Disciples, question Who then can be saved?"
 
 76 
 
 You cannot have forgotten the early and rancorous 
 opposition of the majority of the ruling party to the 
 Bible Society, merely because founded on a principle 
 of filiation and comprehensive. charity : and although 
 it has since received a partial support from some of 
 them in occasional attendance at the Meetings, yet 
 you cannot be the dupe of a craft, which after failing 
 to strangle an infant in its birth, merely adopts it, 
 " to make the best of a bad job." You must have 
 seen the honours of the mitre adorning the heads of 
 those who had most violently opposed it, and 
 shunning those who had been its most ardent friends. 
 Mark the ministerial respect for the passive virtues 
 of Christianity in the promotion of those Christian 
 warriors, the Reverend Mr. Hay and Sir Bate 
 Dudley * ! 
 
 Again, Sir ; as to this charge of " blasphemy ;" 
 consider, before you admit it, the increased zeal of 
 the^Establishment and the sectaries. See them vying 
 with each other in the useful dissemination of their 
 respective religious opinions ; turn to the Laureat's 
 " Life of John Wesley." Ask those who know the 
 habits of the agricultural and manufacturing popu- 
 lation, and ask yourself, whether the English people 
 are not a religious nation? Mark the decent and 
 pious observance of the Sunday throughout the 
 
 * Pluralities and non-residents were never heard of in the primitive 
 ages, and it is a shame there should he so many fat parsonages, 
 and yet so many lean parsons. It is the devil's market where churches 
 ure bought and sold, and such spiritual hucksters deserve to be whipt 
 out of the temple. Heligio Bibliopole-
 
 77 
 
 kingdom ! See the churches and the chapels rising 
 up in all parts ! Inquire into that incredible mass 
 of religious publications from charity schools Bell 
 and Lancastrian systems of education Bible and 
 Tract Societies and ask yourself, whether the 
 imputation of blasphemy is deserved by any class of 
 society ? 
 
 I now proceed, Sir, before closing this Letter, to 
 give you the most clinching proof that the charges 
 brought against us are mere calumnies. It would 
 be endless were I to lay before you the details of 
 every class of religious publication. You know 
 that several hundred distinct periodical works on 
 religion, conducted by individuals, are in monthly 
 circulation. You know that there are innumerable 
 societies in the three kingdoms, of every cast and 
 sect of Christianity, forwarding with ardent and 
 judicious efforts the great object of religious educa- 
 tion. The united efforts of all these associated 
 bodies, in their total amount, it is impossible to cal- 
 culate. I shall, therefore, select only four of the 
 most extensive and wealthy (as irrefutable arguments 
 in proof of the religious character of the times), 
 because they are the four supported by all deno- 
 minations of the British Church universal. 
 
 I. The Society for promoting Christian Know- 
 ledge. The number of Bibles, Common Prayer 
 J3ooks, Tracts, &c. dispersed by the Society,
 
 78 
 
 between the audit April 22, 181.9, and the audit 
 
 April 20, 1 820, is as follows : 
 
 7=i''V.'Tji> ;; fc!;or>iir; to 
 
 3797 Packets of Books sent to Members, on the 
 
 terms of the Society ; consisting of 
 
 Bibles ........... ................... ..... ---- 31,756 
 
 New Testaments and Psalters .................... 53,653 
 
 Common Prayers .............................. 87,884 
 
 Other hound Books ....................... ...... 76,203 
 
 Small Tracts, half-bound, &c. ..... ? ........ ....... 940,014 
 
 - 
 --itbnii 1,189,510 
 
 Packets of Books issued gratuitously : 
 
 Bibles .................... ; ...... ............. 842 
 
 New Testaments and Psalters .................... 1714 
 
 Common Prayers ............................... 1259 
 
 Bound Books ................ ................. 2019 
 
 Small Tracts, half-bound, &c. IWJ . '. ....... . ...... 40,950 
 
 40, 1 04 
 
 -i ' -i. > / " i'i 'fjo'fi') 
 
 Books and Papers issued for gratuitous distribution 
 
 by the Society : 
 
 uiiti-. Jij . >.:, .(if ^ r .-'I!; ; -n.l-J ! 
 
 Directions for a Devout and Decent Behaviour in the 
 
 Public Worship of God ............. in 8ro. 5032 
 
 Ditto ---- " ............. ........... in 12mo. 84,111 
 
 Stonehouse's Admonitions, a broad sheet ........... 10,000 
 
 Papers on Sunday Schools* fjViV*-* * .............. 20.000 
 
 on the Church Catechism ''.' ' ' ...'.'. . 10,000 
 
 >iff Invitations to Church ^tri'J'fO'fij %4iffffe* *{ 20,000 
 
 on Confirmation ' ........... ........ 20,000 
 
 '' ' 
 
 169,143 
 
 j io 'ioj'.in/-,, 1 ) $YV>r,iwyY L'.ff TO rot)' (< 
 The total Number of Bibles, fyc. distributed on the 
 Terms of the Society, and gratuitously, is :^\' in 
 
 Bibles (exclusive of the Society's Family Bible) 32,598 
 
 New Testaments and Psalters 55,367 
 
 Common Prayer Books. ........ ^ i 89,143 
 
 Other bound Books ,1... 78,222 
 
 Small Tracts, half-bound, &c. '...... 980,964 
 
 Books and Papers, issued gratuitously 169,143 
 
 1,405,137
 
 79 
 
 This Society has therefore issued, in this " blas- 
 phemous age," two millions, eight hundred and ten 
 thousand, eight hundred and seventy-four articles 
 on the Christian religion ! 
 
 II. The British and Foreign Bible Society. 
 The number of copies issued from March 31, 
 1819, to March 31, 1820, is 
 i#|?] .Jii-ff liojtf-.i !.rr;<'!mi' ml*!^$j$Sm 
 
 115,775 Bibles, 
 
 141,108 New Testaments. 
 
 Making a total, from the commencement of the 
 Society's issues, of more than two millions, jive 
 hundred andjifty thousand Bibles and Testaments. 
 The following extract of the last report requires no 
 observation : 
 
 " At home the prospect is equally encouraging. 
 Notwithstanding the extraordinary pressure of com- 
 mercial difficulties, and the industrious propagation 
 of irreligious, and even anti-christian opinions, the 
 resources of the Society, so far from suffering any 
 serious diminution, have been very liberally main- 
 tained ; and its operations, viewed on the great 
 scale, have kept pace with the activity and efficiency 
 of the most prosperous eras of the Institution. 
 Never was the demand for the Scriptures so great 
 and general ; and at no period were means pro- 
 vided in such abundance for printing editions of 
 them, or channels opened in so great a variety of 
 places for their free and general circulation. These
 
 80 
 
 assertions are so completely sustained by the facts 
 which your committee have reported, that they 
 appeal to them with confidence, as affording matter 
 for the most devout gratitude and the most cordial 
 satisfaction. The craving desires which have been 
 expressed for the word of God, and the thankfulness 
 which has been uttered when this desire has been 
 gratified, have been uniformly associated with those 
 principles and feelings, on which are founded 
 loyalty and contentment, subjection to principalities 
 and powers for conscience sake, and a quiet and 
 peaceable demeanour in all godliness and honesty." 
 
 III. The Prayer Book and Homily Society. 
 The last report of this Society (1819-20) speaks 
 of the encouragement they receive " when they 
 see such an increasing zeal in numbers to distribute, 
 and hear, in many instances, of such a willingness 
 in others to receive, these plain and simple expo- 
 sitions of Scripture doctrine." 
 
 The issue of Prayer-Books, Psalters, and the 
 Book of Homilies, from this Society's depository, 
 during the last year, has been as follows : English 
 Prayer-Books, .9,372; Irish Prayer- Books, 170; 
 Welsh, 333; Greek Prayer- Books, 12. Of en- 
 larged Psalters, 978 copies have been issued ; of 
 common Psalters, 443. And during the same 
 period, 171 copies of the Book of Homilies in 
 octavo have been disposed of; 82 in duodecimo;
 
 81 
 
 and in folio, 1 .5 ; making the total issue of bound 
 books, during twelve months, 1 1,581. 
 
 Of Homily tracts the committee report an 
 increased issue, to the amount of 4000. The 
 whole number of these, together with the articles 
 of religion in the same form, which have been 
 
 < O ***. .. ' **..- ^ 
 
 sold or distributed since NJery, 1819> is 34,545. 
 Of the Ordination services, 179 copies have 
 been sold ; making the entire number of these 
 large works, issued during twelve months, thirty^ 
 four thousand, seven hundred and fourteen. 
 
 IV. The Religious Tract Society. This 
 Society, in the last year, ending May, 1820, 
 has alone disseminated upwards of three hundred 
 different works on religious subjects, and not One of 
 them on doctrinal points. Of one particular tract, 
 " Extracts from the Life .of Thomas Paine," one 
 hundred thousand copies were circulated within 
 three months from the time of its first publication ! 
 
 The total number of tracts issued since the last 
 report, amounts to Jive millions, six hundred and 
 twenty-sir thousand, six hundred and seventy- 
 four ; making an INCREASED distribution of one 
 million, Jive hundred and eighty-three thousand, 
 three hundred and fifty-three, during the past 
 year. 
 
 It will be observed, that these are only annual 
 reports of societies of many years' establishment; 
 
 G
 
 and that no notice has been taken of that amazing 
 
 o 
 
 branch of bookselling the trade in old or second- 
 hand books. There is not a stall in London where 
 the passenger may not learn of its proprietor that 
 the religious department of literature is his most 
 extensive and profitable business. The Whole 
 Duty of Man, the Pilgrim's Progress, the Holy 
 Living and Dying, and the Book of Martyrs, are 
 to be found in every alley in London : and I have 
 the authority of the first divinity booksellers, in 
 asserting the advance in value of old divinity, 
 already the most expensive class of books. The 
 increase of modern divinity, I think, I may be 
 allowed to consider amply proved ; and it will be 
 observed, that I have not included in the account 
 the Royal proclamations against obscenity and dis- 
 soluteness of manners. 
 
 If these facts do not amount to a moral demon- 
 stration on this point, I am at a loss to conceive 
 from what quarter stronger evidence could be col- 
 lected to establish the truth of any proposition. 
 
 I am, Sir, 
 
 Your obedient Servant and Fellow-Christian, 
 CHRISTOPHILUS.
 
 
 LETTER V. 
 
 AS TO THE CONDUCT OF THE CLERGY THE ONLY 
 REAL DANGER OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 To William Wilberforce, Esq. 
 
 " Indeed, 'till spiritual and secular concerns be reduced to their 
 proper ranks, which are now mixed and confounded, the 
 better to disguise the preposterous subordination of the noble 
 to the inferior ; till we have forgotten the unhappy chymistry 
 of turning all, even Religion itself, into gold, we must never 
 hope to get out of the furnace; our flames will still grow 
 fiercer, and with this unnatural effect to consume not the dross, 
 
 but the purer met at. BISHOP FELL'S Causes of the Decay 
 
 of Christian Piety, 1677. 
 
 SIR, It is with the most painful reluctance I 
 sit down to the part of my subject which this Letter 
 is to contain fearful lest I should undermine the 
 respect and influence due to the clerical character, 
 or appear to confound the virtuous portion of the 
 Clergy with those worldly-minded and meddling 
 priests who have affixed such a stigma on their 
 honourable profession. But the power they possess 
 of exciting fears and panics in the minds of 
 credulous persons, and the active part they have
 
 84 
 
 lately taken in calumniating and persecuting the 
 People, requires the strongest antidote to their 
 poison. Viewing them, too, as the composers, 
 movers, and seconders of the great proportion of the 
 ultra-loyal addresses, it is impossible to pass over 
 much of that delinquency to which, otherwise for 
 the honour of our common faith, one would wish to 
 shut one's eyes. 
 
 Having made ample exposure of the falsehood of 
 their accusations, and having also enumerated many 
 glaring instances of their intermeddling with secular 
 concerns, it will not be necessary for me here to 
 enlarge on that head. In a religion established 
 by law, in the possession of splendid emoluments 
 and dignities, it cannot be a matter of astonishment 
 that the Clergy who are candidates for its distinc- 
 tions should feel every inclination to strengthen the 
 arm on which they lean. They have ever been 
 skilful in discerning the signs of the times. It is 
 an old saying, that men should come into Court 
 with clean hands ; and though it is rather invidious 
 to visit the sins of our ancestors on posterity, yet it 
 cannot but be observed, that their past and present 
 conduct has been so thoroughly consistent, that as a 
 body they possess no equitable claim for indulgence. 
 They have been the tools of Popery and despotism 
 the advocates of passive obedience and non- 
 resistance the opponents of the Reformation and 
 the Revolution- have ever endeavoured to ease the
 
 85 
 
 People of their liberty, and to rid their monarchs of 
 the cramp of Parliaments. In short, from the 
 earliest to the latest period their conduct has tallied 
 with Ra pin's description of their principles and 
 practice in the reign of Charles II: " The Clergy 
 particularly distinguished themselves by shewing 
 their attachment to the principles and maxims of 
 the Court, and seemed to make it their business to 
 surrender to the King all the liberties and privileges 
 of the subjects, and to leave them only an unlimited 
 obedience. According to the principles publickly 
 preached, no Eastern monarch was more absolute 
 than the King of England." (Vol. ii. p. 725.) An 
 ecclesiastical history is not, however, the object of 
 these pages ; and I shall therefore be content with 
 referring the curious reader to the histories of his 
 country, to the numerous tracts which appeared on 
 the right of the Bishops to vote in Parliament, and 
 particularly to a rare pamphlet of great ingenuity 
 and research, entitled, " A Short View of the Con- 
 duct of the English Clergy, so far as relates to Civil 
 Affairs, from the Conquest to the Revolution, 1 737." 
 Bishop Burnett, who knew them well, has not been 
 very tender of their reputations ; and in the tracts 
 of Gordon and Trenchard they are stripped naked 
 for the public view. 
 
 To their conduct in the present times I have 
 already alluded. Its impolicy, to say nothing of its 
 anti-christianity, is too glaring to escape the obscr-
 
 86 
 
 vation of the commonest pretender to sagacity. At 
 a period when all men and things are rapidly 
 advancing on the great road of improvement when 
 knowledge is making the most rapid strides they 
 are often retrograding, or at any rate acting as if time 
 were standing still. Deaf to the awful warnings of 
 the last century, they are walking blindfold to the 
 brink of a precipice. When the finances and public 
 credit of the country are in the most imminent 
 danger, when nothing but the most rigid and 
 cautelous economy can possibly avoid the ruin 
 staring us in the face the Clergy make themselves 
 objects of national antipathy, as if anxious to afford 
 a plea for sequestrating the property of the Church 
 to the relief of the State. When encompassed 
 about with sectaries, and (as they say) with infidels, 
 they narrow the passages to the Church, and block 
 up the doors of its entrance. The more bitter the 
 political animosities which rage around them, the 
 more eager are they to mix in the fray ; and, instead 
 of conciliating, they appear only anxious to push on 
 measures which inevitably tend to irritate and 
 increase their opponents, and to thin the ranks of 
 their friends. A more senseless and insane career 
 never was run in an Indian muck ; and their bitterest 
 enemies could not desire a more certain or speedy 
 self-destruction. The evil consequences of this 
 total estrangement of their time and attention from 
 their sacred calling are notorious, in the fact of
 
 87 
 
 scarcely a solitary work of standard criticism or 
 biblical learning having emanated from the Church 
 during the last twenty years. But, to make up for 
 this deficiency, they can doubtless boast abundance 
 of political pamphlets, which amply show their 
 readiness to serve as the automatons of the minister 
 of the day. Never was the lamentable effect of 
 this diversion of the pursuits of the Clergy more 
 apparent than in the late prosecution of the Queen. 
 When pointedly called upon for their opinions and 
 knowledge on one of the gravest questions of morals 
 ever brought before a British Legislature, the heads 
 of the Church exhibited an ignorance that would 
 have disgraced the commonest beaters of the 
 " drum ecclesiastic" among the ranters. There 
 was wanting even the slightest attempt to distinguish 
 and discriminate the religious and political principles 
 of the institution of marriage : no one seemed even 
 to know when, where, how long, or to what extent, 
 the Church had claimed jurisdiction on the subject ; 
 and the most vulgar errors were betrayed on 
 passages of Scripture which the junior student of a 
 divinity class (if such a thing now exists) ought to 
 blush to appear ignorant of. Great facility was seen 
 in making up their minds to vote for the State; 
 but though many could declare the Divorce Bill 
 repugnant to the law of God, it was wonderful to 
 observe, that their consciences could not permit them 
 to vote for its rejection, but urged them to adopt a
 
 88 
 
 negative policy as a religious mode of extricating 
 themselves from so distressing a dilemma! Never 
 was there a more practical demonstration of the 
 irreligion, the absurdity, of mixing up the spiritual 
 with the temporal character. The reader of parlia- 
 mentary antiquities is aware that the original right 
 of the Bishops to sit and to vote in Parliament has 
 long been a subject of controversy. That they have 
 now by prescription, sanctioned by the statute law, 
 the possession of that right, cannot be denied ; but 
 even to this day it has been customary for them to 
 retire on votes in capital cases : and I may perhaps 
 be allowed to say, without the idle charge of innova- 
 tion, that recent events have proved that their total 
 emancipation from the burden of civil business 
 could not but prove highly advantageous to the real 
 interests of the Church. I put it to the reflecting 
 reader, whether some of the following objections to 
 their votes as Spiritual Lords were not fully verified 
 on a late occasion ? They are extracted from a 
 " Printed Abstract of Nine Reasons of the House 
 of Commons against the Votes of Bishops in Parlia- 
 ment, printed by order of a Committee of the 
 House," 1641. 
 
 " I. Because it is a very great hinderance to the 
 exercise of their ministeriall function. 
 
 "II. Because they doe Vow and undertake at their 
 ordination, when they enter into holy orders, that 
 they will give themselves wholely to that vocation*.
 
 89 
 
 " III. Because councels and canons in several! 
 
 ages do forbid them to meddle with secular affaires.. 
 
 - " IV. Because the twentie-foure Bishops have a 
 
 dependancy upon the Archbishops, and because of 
 
 their canonieall obedience to them. 
 
 " V. Because they are but for their lives, and 
 therefore are not fit to have Legislative power over 
 the honours, inheritances, persons, and liberties of 
 others. 
 
 " VI. Because of Bishops' dependency, and expec- 
 tancy of translations to places of greater profit* 
 
 " VII. The severall Bishops have of late much 
 encroached upon the consciences and properties of 
 the subject. And they and their successors will bee 
 much encouraged still to encroach, and the subject 
 will be much discouraged from complaining against 
 such encroachments, if twentie-six of that order bee 
 to bee Judges upon these complaints. The same 
 reason extends to their legislative power, in any 
 Bill to passe for the reformation of their power upon 
 any emergent inconvenience by it. 
 
 " VIII. Because the whole number of them is 
 interessed to maintaine the jurisdiction of Bishops ; 
 which hath beene found so grievous to the three 
 kingdomes, that Scotland hath utterly abolished it, 
 and multitudes in England and Ireland have peti- 
 tioned against it. 
 
 " IX. Because Bishops being Lords of Parlia- 
 ment, it setteth too great a distance between them
 
 90 
 
 and the rest of their brethren in the ministry, which 
 occasioneth pride in them, discontent in others, and 
 disquiet in the Church." 
 
 There is here matter for great reflection; and 
 although I (of course) do not concur in the eighth 
 reason, yet this much I may say, that if the con- 
 duct of the Clergy is not speedily reformed, it will 
 become one of the most cogent and unanswerable : 
 that the effect of it in terrorem may produce that 
 reformation, is my most sincere prayer*. 
 
 I am one of those, Sir, who regard the protection 
 
 * " But seeing the evangelical precept forbids churchmen to inter- 
 meddle with worldly employments, what interweavings, or inter- 
 workings, can knit the minister and the magistrate, in their several 
 functions, to the regard of any precise correspondency ? Seeing that 
 the churchman's office is only to teach men the Christian faith, to 
 exhort all, to encourage the good, to admonish the bad, privately 
 the less offender, publicly the scandalous and stubborn ; to censure 
 and separate from the communion of Christ's flock the contagious and 
 incorrigible, to receive with joy and fatherly compassion the peni- 
 tent ; all this must be done, and more than this is beyond any 
 church authority. What is all this, either here or there, to the 
 temporal regiment of weal public whether it be popular, princely, 
 or monarchical ? Where doth it intrench upon the temporal go- 
 vernor ? where does it come in his walk ? where does it make 
 inroad upon his jurisdiction ? Indeed, if the minister's part be 
 rightly discharged, it renders him the people more conscionable, 
 quiet, and easy to be governed : if otherwise, his life and doctrine 
 will declare him. If, therefore, the constitution of the Church be 
 already set down by Divine prescript, as all sides confess, then can 
 she not be a handmaid to wait on civil commodities and respects ; 
 and if the nature and limits of church discipline be such as are 
 either helpful to all political estates indifferently, or have no par- 
 ticular relation to any, then there is no necessity, nor indeed pos- 
 sibility, of linking the one with the other in a special commission." 
 MILTON, of the Reformation in England.
 
 91 
 
 of the State as highly conducive to the interests of 
 Christianity as a public sanction due to its Divine 
 origin from a nation of Christians and as expe- 
 dient, in order to keep the form of religion, ever 
 before our eyes, if it be for no other end than to 
 remind us of the reality. I esteem the Church of 
 England, baiting some defects of easy remedy, as 
 an excellent model of an ecclesiastical establish- 
 ment. I revere its first founders, as erudite scholars 
 and liberal-minded Christians ; and it is well known, 
 that had the spirit of their times permitted, they 
 would have entirely removed the remains of Popish 
 hierarchy and superstition which still deface its 
 constitution. I regard the liturgies and forms of 
 this establishment, with very few exceptions, almost 
 perfect patterns of piety and devotional taste, and 
 eminently conducive to the purposes of that public 
 adoration of the Deity which greatly tends to curb 
 our passions and to excite our virtues. Let it, 
 however, be always remembered, that forms and 
 ceremonies have in themselves little intrinsic value ; 
 that they are but the means of good ; and that the 
 true estimate of the utility and tendency of cere- 
 monies, as well as of opinions on speculative points, 
 is only to be formed on a calculation of their 
 aptitude to influence our practice. Whatever pro- 
 duces a beneficial effect in this way, is of the highest 
 value whatever prejudices or retards that object, 
 ought to be abolished and whatever is neutral in
 
 these operations, may be justly viewed as indifferent, 
 and a useless incumbrance. Would to God that 
 Christians could be converted to the belief, that it 
 Is not the variety of opinion which occasions our 
 lamentable civil dissensions, but the refusal of liberty 
 to differ ; the mischief Ues in our not choosing to 
 allow ourselves to differ. If this freedom were 
 permitted in religion, as in all other questions 
 which agitate the human mind, we should preserve 
 the same ingenuousness and good will which we 
 practise in differences on all other subjects of phi- 
 losophy and science. Those who have done most 
 for the interests of Christianity who have best 
 acted up to their principles have ever been the 
 most dispassionate and diffident critics. They have 
 viewed the divisions of the Christian world with 
 the regret which their results require of every 
 benevolent mind ; and, both by their public and 
 private influence, they have done their utmost to 
 promote conciliation and allay violence. Not an 
 eminent writer, of any age or country, whose cha- 
 racter and works have survived the ephemeral pre- 
 judices of his time, but strives to impress upon us 
 the virtue of rational doubt and diffident impar- 
 tiality in all discussions on speculative points of 
 doctrine. On such subjects, the respect due to the 
 opinions of the many wise and excellent men, who, 
 with equal natural and acquired advantages, have 
 differed so widely, and the warning conveyed by
 
 93 
 
 their vain and indeterminate disputes, should induce 
 some pause in the judgment. We may be con- 
 fident and yet mistaken, zealous but unwelcome 
 friends. Christians would generally be surprised, 
 would they but give that attention to discover the 
 agreement that exists between them in all the real 
 
 O 
 
 elements of their common faith, which they waste 
 in endeavouring to procure unanimity on dogmatic 
 articles : and I really believe, that if all contro- 
 versies about belief were abandoned, not the 
 slightest detriment would result to the Christian 
 church; but, on the contrary, a far more perfect 
 obedience to those real evangelical rules of devo- 
 tional faith and practice which were taught by 
 Jesus Christ, and about the tendency and nature of 
 whicli we are all agreed. Not that it can be 
 rationally expected that the Christian world should 
 ever be in all respects of one opinion and one 
 creed. The principle of human society, .and the 
 nature of the human mind, the creature of circum- 
 stance and education, will prevent such a uniformity 
 of opinion; and, perhaps, the interest of religion 
 itself requires that these differences should to a 
 certain extent exist. The springs of human action 
 are not always of the purest origin ; and without 
 some of the excitement which these divisions 
 create, religion might be in danger from apathy 
 and neglect. The same Providence which blessed 
 the human race with the Gospel revelation, could
 
 94 
 
 liave placed its minutest doctrines, history, and 
 precepts, beyond the power of doubt: that it has 
 not so vouchsafed, is evident ; and it is as evident to 
 my mind, that those doubts, and the discussions to 
 which they have given rise, were permitted for 
 important ends. Christianity was not to be pro- 
 pagated by the sword; and rational discussion, 
 enlisting in its service the ardent faculties of the 
 mind, has doubtless, under the dispensation of a 
 wise Providence, been intended as an efficient 
 means to its support and spread. In fact, the 
 apostolic age itself, with all its superhuman aid, 
 was not free from its internal disputes. Peter and 
 Paul contended with zeal upon a most vital ques- 
 tion ; but the ultimate benefit was evident, in the 
 increased energy it gave Christianity, by subdividing 
 the labours of the first planters of its truths. So 
 also the apostasies of the early churches served a 
 similar end ; and had it not been for the corruptions 
 -of the Corinthian and Gallatian churches, so 
 Jamented and boldly reproved by St. Paul, the 
 present age would not have possessed the powerful 
 ^evidence for the truth of Christianity which is de- 
 duced from his invaluable epistles. Thus all things 
 M-ork together for the best, and out of evil cometh 
 good. So, in the present day, the sifting discrimi- 
 nating industry and nervous intellectual intrepidity 
 of the heterodox dissenter, have originated the 
 most laborious and inestimable investigations of the
 
 95 
 
 external evidences of revelation. The cold and 
 sceptical spirit too often accompanying speculative 
 inquiry, is tempered by the taste, erudition, and 
 watchfulness of the orthodox churchman. The 
 one is prevented from starving religion, and the 
 other from smothering it with over care. The 
 democratical honesty of the non-conformist, always 
 disposed to doubt and attack every thing old, is 
 opposed to the subserviency of State divines, whose 
 business it is to maintain whatever is established. 
 The toy-shop of the Catholic has a set-off in the 
 ice-house of the free-thinking dissenter, and the 
 happy medium lies between them. Thus in the 
 political world the dangers of a too ardent philan- 
 thropy are met and prevented by a scrupulous 
 idolatry of every thing pleading the sanction of age 
 a most useful counterpoise, by which the rust of 
 time is often removed, and yet the dangers of rap ; d 
 changes averted. It would be unwise. to seek the 
 abrogation of an indifferent law, before we have a 
 better to superinduce in its stead; and it is folly 
 to condemn the evils of any institutions, without 
 balancing their accompanying good. But even if 
 heresy and schism be the evils, " the plague, the 
 pestilence, and famine," which thus appear when 
 hovering before the eyes of many a zealous church- 
 man, constraint and insult will never eradicate 
 them, or produce conviction. The experience of 
 all ages shows the mistaken effect of violence and
 
 persecution. " He is the $rue, heretic who burns r 
 not he who is burnt" Creeds, articles, and cate- 
 chisms, instead of making all mankind think alike, 
 have had the very opposite tendency. It is high 
 time for priestcraft, therefore, to adopt some other 
 course; seeing that all its efforts cannot impede the 
 march .of .the human mind, or prevent the use of 
 that noble and distinctive ; prerogative of human 
 nature th$ liberty of philosophising. When I 
 see these futile attempts to force all our thoughts 
 down the state channel, I cannot helpT thinking of 
 the Irishman's exclamation in the burning faggot-rt 
 '* Ah, my honeys, men will never all see alike 'till 
 their eyes are put out!" 
 
 A catholic spirit of religious liberty may subsist 
 under infinite varieties of opinion, and without 
 the least prejudice to the advancement of the true 
 one. " It was a notable observation of a wise 
 father," says Lord Bacon, "and no less ingenuously 
 confessed, that those which held and persuaded 
 pressure of consciences, were commonly interested 
 therein themselves for their own ends." The same 
 incomparable writer, every sentence of whose Essays 
 contains a quarry of wisdom, relates that it is noted 
 by another father, " Christ's coat had indeed no 
 seam, but the Church's vesture was of divers colours : 
 there may be varieties of colours in the vestures, 
 but let there be no rent." " These human varieties 
 of opinion," says Milton, " are as necessary to
 
 97 
 
 truth, as the storms of the material world to the 
 purifying the atmosphere." And at that glorious 
 day, when He shall come to judge the quick and 
 the dead, " he shall bring together every joint and 
 member, and shall mould them into an immortal 
 feature of loveliness and perfection." 
 
 Professing, therefore, great veneration for the 
 established Church, I must admit, as a consequence, 
 that it ought to be upholden and maintained with 
 dignity and effect But I am one of those, as by 
 this time it will be suspected, who consider the 
 Church of England may well subsist, and be more 
 firmly established, without any civil disabilities* 
 
 * Arguments without end have been adduced in proof of tolera- 
 tion. " Every man has an undoubted right to judge for himself in 
 matters of religion ; nor should any mark of infamy, or any civil 
 penalty, be attached to the exercise of his right. Every man has a 
 right to the common privileges of the society in which he lives ; and, 
 among these common privileges, a capacity in law for serving his 
 sovereign and country is one of the most valuable, distinguishing a 
 legal capacity of service from a right to an actual appointment, 
 which depends upon the choice of his sovereign, or of his fellow-citi- 
 zens; and this' capacity of serving the State is a right of such high 
 estimation, and of such transcendent value, that exclusion from it is 
 deemed a proper punishment for some of the greatest crimes. Actions, 
 and not opinions, political or religious, are the proper objects of hu^- 
 man authority and cognizance. No man, who does not forfeit that 
 capacity of serving his sovereign and country, which is his natural 
 right, as well as the honour and emoluments that may happsn to be 
 connected with it, by overt acts, ought to be deprived of them ; and 
 disabilities that are not thus incurred are unjust penalties, implying 
 both disgrace and privation. Punishment, without the previous 
 proof of guilt, cannot be denied to be an injury ; and injuries inflicted 
 on account of religion are undoubtedly persecutions. The ends of 
 civil society can never justify any abridgement of natural rights that 
 
 H
 
 98 
 
 being inflicted on those who separate themselves from 
 its communion 
 
 " To force our consciences that Christ made free, 
 And ride us with a classic hierarchy." 
 
 I am of opinion that many of its articles of belief 
 are by no means necessary, and, on the contrary, 
 often hurtful to its constitution : and as I can con- 
 cede infallibility to no set of men, I contend that 
 the several circumstances of persons, time, and place, 
 may require that variation should, from time to 
 time, be made in its formularies and outward pro- 
 fessions. These, Sir, were the principles of the 
 very men who, at the Reformation, remoulded the 
 worn-out shape of Catholic Christianity; and to 
 impugn these principles, is to dig up the very found- 
 ations of our Church, and to destroy the materials 
 which its founders left for its repair. And fatal 
 will it be to the Church of England, as it has been 
 to all former establishments, if pride and prejudice 
 shall oppose that needful emendation which the 
 circumstances of the times render not only politic 
 but necessary. He is, indeed, a treacherous friend 
 to the Church, who would throttle it in the gripe of 
 custom. " As those who first bring honour into 
 their familv. are commonly more worthy than 
 
 / ' v / 
 
 is not essential to these ends. The institutions of religion, and the 
 ordinances of civil government, are distinct in their origin and their 
 objects, in the sanctions that enforce them, and the mode in which 
 they are administered."
 
 most that succeed ; so the first precedent (if it 
 be good) is seldom attained by imitation. Surely 
 every medicine is an innovation, and he that 
 will not apply new remedies, must expect new 
 evils; for time is the greatest innovator; and if 
 time of course alter things to the worse, and wisdom 
 and counsel shall not alter them to the better, what 
 shall be the end ? All this is true, &c. if time stood 
 still ; which contrariwise moveth so round, that a 
 froward retention of custom is as turbulent a thing 
 as an innovation ; and they that reverence too much 
 old times, are but a scorn to the new. It were 
 good, therefore, that men in their innovations would 
 follow the example of time itself, which indeed in- 
 novateth greatly, but quietly, and by degrees scarce 
 to be perceived ; for otherwise whatsoever is new 
 is unlocked for ; and ever it mends some, and impairs 
 others : and he that is holpen takes it for a fortune, 
 and thanks the time; and he that is hurt for a 
 wrong, and imputeth it to the author." Lord 
 BACON on Innovations. 
 
 A salutary inspection and revision of the Esta- 
 blishment has been counselled by some of the most 
 learned and upright Prelates. The rejection of 
 their advice has been the notorious cause of the 
 increase of dissent from its forms and doctrines, and 
 of separation from its communion ; first, on the 
 ground of church government occasioned by this 
 obstinate contempt of the first principles of the
 
 100 
 
 Reformation ; and, subsequently, on the score of 
 differences in opinion on doctrinal points, which has 
 since crumbled Christianity into innumerable and 
 infinitely divided atoms, and (in the vulgar language 
 of a sceptical writer) has made the Christian doc- 
 trines " spiritual make-baits, bareters, beautifeus, and 
 incendiaries and churches bear-gardens, where 
 beasts are only the combatants." 
 
 It is high time, therefore, that out of a regard to 
 its own existence and re-establishment, the Church 
 should consider what causes of dissent she can 
 remedy without inconsistency, and what means she 
 can now adopt to restore her to her pristine vigour and 
 influence. That such a liberality is her true interest, 
 cannot be denied. She has only to open her doors 
 wide enough for the multitude to enter in, and to 
 restore God to his empire over conscience. There 
 is a natural bias in the youthful mind to follow the 
 national road : young people care little for those 
 bones of contention over which angry polemics 
 snarl : the forms of the Church are far more popu- 
 lar and attractive than the frigidness of the Non- 
 conformists' Chapel. To this end the Clergy must 
 more immediately interest young people in the study 
 of religion ; for the most lamentable ignorance of it 
 exists in the middle and higher ranks of English 
 society. It is a subject of which most " accom- 
 plished" men are profoundly ignorant, and which 
 they banish from all thought or conversation. The
 
 101 
 
 fashion of professing religion by the proxy of a 
 Clergyman's Sunday offices, must be assisted by a 
 return to domestic and family devotion and to indi- 
 vidual study of the Bible. Children must be less 
 hampered with dictated and hieroglyphical descrip- 
 tions, and taught to reason sooner and better than 
 they are at present permitted : parents must gra- 
 dually lay before them the interesting process of 
 historical evidence, step by step, as they are pre- 
 pared for it must teach them early and frequently 
 to reason for themselves, and to make further search 
 for the certainty of what has been taught them. 
 
 " But while Protestants, to avoid the due labour 
 of understanding their own religion, are content to 
 lodge it in the breast, or rather in the books of a 
 Clergyman, and to take it thence by scraps and 
 mammocks, as he dispenses it in his Sunday s dole; 
 they will be always learning, and never knowing ; 
 always infants ; always either his vassals, as lay- 
 papists are to their Priests ; or at odds with him, 
 as reformed principles give them some light to be 
 not wholly conformable ; whence infinite disturb- 
 ances in the State, as they do, must needs 
 follow*." 
 
 Without reference to any particular doctrinal 
 opinions, I must beg leave to deprecate those dark 
 
 * MILTOJJ'S Considerations touching the likeliest Means to remove 
 Hirelings out of the Church.
 
 102 
 
 and almost dreadful representations of the Deity, 
 which scare the juvenile heart from the elevating 
 study of religion. It has been well observed, that 
 nothing displeases angry polemics more than setting 
 the great gate of Heaven too wide open ; an envious 
 kind of pride, which thinks it more honourable to 
 enter in with a few at a narrow wicket. If any one 
 leads the way but themselves, some person* account 
 it a smuggling of souls, and a violation of their 
 embargo. Far be it from me to overturn that moral 
 responsibility which is the key-stone of the Gospel, 
 or to weaken the restraints of the sacred law ; but 
 I consider these misrepresentations of our Divine 
 Parent as striking at the root of all religion, and 
 being beyond all others the most pregnant cause of 
 unbelief. Fearful lest these remarks might be sub- 
 ject to misinterpretation, 1 shall express what I have 
 further to say on this head in the eloquent words of 
 Dr. Cud worth, whose " orthodoxy" few will doubt 
 "_Is God powerful to kill and to destroy, to damn 
 and to torment, and is he not powerful to save? 
 Nay, it is the.swetest flowre in all the garland of 
 his attributes, it is the richest diamond in his crown 
 of glory, that he is mighty to save : and this is far 
 more magnificent for him, then to be stiled mighty 
 to destroy. For that, except it be in the way of 
 justice, speaks no power at all, but mere impotency, 
 for the root of all power is goodnesse. Or must
 
 103 
 
 we say, lastly, that God indeed is able to rescue us 
 out of the power of sinne and Satan when we sigh 
 and grone towards him ; but yet sometimes to exer- 
 cise his absolute authority, his uncontrolled domi- 
 nion, he delights rather in plunging wretched souls 
 down into infernal night, and everlasting darknesse? 
 What shall \ve then make the God of the whole 
 world ? Nothing but a cruell and dreadful Erynnis, 
 with curled fiery snakes about his head, and fire- 
 brands in his hands, thus governing the world ! 
 Surely this will make us either secretly to think that 
 there is no God at all in the world, if he must needs 
 
 be such, or else to wish heartily there were 
 
 * " 
 none . 
 
 Let the Church review her articles, her creeds, 
 and confessions of faith, which are, in many points, 
 fetters on those within, and stumbling-blocks to 
 those without. " Most of all Churches do, like 
 coy maids, lace their bodies so strait, that they bring 
 on themselves a consumption; and will have the 
 gates of heaven only made for themselves ; they 
 pull up the ladders from the reach of others, after 
 they have by them scaled the walls of preferment 
 themselves." 
 
 In the foregoing observations, Sir, it has been my 
 sole wish to communicate to the Church what I 
 
 * Sermon preached before,tbe House of Commons, 1647. ,
 
 esteem wholesome truths. Let her reform herself: 
 and let her Ministers leave oft* calumniating the 
 People, and join in the labour. " Such a review," 
 says Bishop Stillingfleet, in his preface to the Un- 
 reasonableness of Separation, " made by wise and 
 peaceable men, not given to wrath or disputating, 
 may be so far from being a dishonour to this Church, 
 that it might add to the glory of it*." 
 
 I am, Sir, 
 With the highest respect, 
 
 Your obedient Servant and Fellow-Christian, 
 / 
 
 CHRISTOPHILUS. 
 
 * When the day of Religious Freedom arrives, I trust that the pale of 
 immunities will be extended wide enough to include all those who are 
 at present beyond its limits ; and do not be alarmed, Mr. Wilberforce, 
 if I put in my plea even for the Jews. I am aware of the great appre- 
 hension entertained lest any thing should appear to aim at what is 
 called " defeating prophecy :" but I contend that sacred prophecy 
 itself affords us unquestionable grounds for confidence that even these 
 outcasts would not eat up the Church of England, until the times of 
 the Gentiles be fulfilled. Grant them their civil rights. You have a 
 Rich Child of Israel for your t( virtual" Chancellor of the Exchequer. 
 Let him turn him to account imitate Pharaoh's example, and make 
 Joseph prime minister. Why should you doubt a grateful return 
 of support to our venerable establishments. " M. N. Rotchschild" 
 and " Zachariah Levi" are detected putting their hands to a Hole and 
 Corner Address, professing their zeal for the Christian Revelation, 
 and pledging their support of the " policied alliance" between 
 Church and State. " We declare it to be our firm and unalterable
 
 105 
 
 purpose (they say) to maintain our holy religion in all its purity I" 
 Let us not, therefore, fear the non-comformityof Judaism ; but rather 
 rejoice to hear so enlightened a friend of Civil and Religious Freedom 
 as Lord Holland publicly express his wish that these extra-parochial 
 wanderers might regain those civil rights which they possessed before 
 the professors of Christianity got the better of them. If indeed the 
 question be raised, Whether on a balance of accounts the Jews are 
 not better entitled to this restoration to political privileges than 
 Protestant Dissenters ? J should not fear advocating the cause of the 
 former ; and would beg to refer you to "The Com plaint of the Children 
 of Israel, representing their Grievances under the Penal Laws ; and 
 praying that, if the Tests are repealed, the Jews may have the benefit 
 of this indulgence in common with all other subjects of England, by 
 Solomon Abrabanel, 1736." About the same time as this tract 
 appeared, several others were published on the same subject ; and per~ 
 haps the reader will excuse me if I extend this note to a short 
 statement of a few of their arguments. The Jews say to the Church 
 of England You have laid hold of the promise which was made to 
 our father Abraham, and have taken the Kingdom of Heaven as your 
 inheritance, through the children of Israel ; whilst you exclude the 
 whole twelve tribes from every privilege of the society in which they 
 Jive. You have converted our moiety of the Bible to your own use, 
 and have utterly prohibited us from taking any advantage of the New 
 Testament, which might satisfy us for our loss of the Old. You have 
 violently seized upon Moses andAaron, and theTen Commandmeuts, 
 which were our natural property, and have placed them over your 
 Communion Tables ; yet make this pretence of Christian community a 
 reason for excluding us from all advantages as members of the Com- 
 monwealth : so that our Law and our Prophets can afford us no 
 protection, though you have exalted them to your first places of 
 worship. You have robbed us of our Priesthood, and (what flesh and 
 blood is scarcely able to bear) you have taken from us our Tythes ; yet 
 you have given us nothing in exchange but taxes for our goods, 
 reprobation and damnation for our souls, if after the loss of our goods 
 and gear Satan can be such a drivelling fool as to take us, For God's 
 sake, therefore, look upon us as a People whom you have injured, and 
 to whom you are indebted. We are not in the case of Dissen(erf, 
 who are said to have injured you : we never turned you out of your 
 churches, we never set up your chapter lands to sale, nor pulled 
 down your hierarchy ; but, on the contrary, it i to us that you owe 
 your mitres and your revenue, privileges, and pre-eminences. If any
 
 106 
 
 one asks, whence you derive your Priesthood, you know in your 
 consciences that Christ himself was a Layman ; you fetch your 
 pedigree from the house of Aaron, and make more profit to your 
 order of the Five Books of Moses, than of all the Four Evangelists. 
 As you are beholden to us for the most valuable of your emoluments, 
 you owe the most useful of your Politics" to our Institutions. You 
 have learned from us that the righteous are entitled to the whole 
 earth. We address this to all denominations of Christians. We 
 lay not the debt to the charge of the orthodox only : and we acknow- 
 ledge that the Dissenters have their due share of all the gifts and 
 graces derived from us : we therefore adopt the same reasoning for 
 both sides ; and since all concur to purloin their most profitable prac- 
 tical doctrines from the Children of Israel, we charge all with 
 ingratitude beyond example, in debarring the Jews from the enjoy~ 
 ment of their natural rights. We are not guilty of innovations, but 
 are punished for adhering to our old forms. We are charged with too 
 violent a passion for the mammon of unrighteousness ; but we find the 
 most sanctified Christians as little scrupulous of taking the profit of 
 worldly lucre to themselves, as they are of throwing the scandal upon 
 us. We get what we can, and keep what we get, not by any prin- 
 ciple of religion, but of convenience; and this principle reigns in as 
 full perfection amongst the saints at Hackney, as among the Children 
 of Israel in Bury Street or Duke Place. We cannot but wonder at 
 receiving uncivil usage from our brethren the Dissenters, who have 
 laid themselves under so many obligations to us Jews, have turned 
 us out of possession of all our ancient privileges, and allow us as little 
 right iu the Old Testament, as we pretend to have in the New. We 
 say to them, you appropriate the Songs of Sion to yourselves, as if 
 they were Hymns of your own composing: you have made prize of 
 all the Psalms of David, as if he had not been a King of Israel ; and 
 all the blessings of the law, and all the curses of the prophets, are con- 
 verted to your own use, as if the Israelites had no property in them. 
 After this, it is marvellously strange that you will share with us none 
 of your prospective emoluments, but would debar us of all the indul- 
 gences to which you yourselves lay claim. What pretence can there 
 be, that, contrary to the whole spirit of the Constitution of the coun- 
 try in which we live, we Jews, of all other People, should have no 
 share in enacting or executing the laws which we are bound to obey ? 
 Your Prime Minister consults us in his difficulties we give him our 
 advice we lend him our money and trust him with our property. 
 Why will he not trust us in return ? Why might not the land of Ca-
 
 107 
 
 \ 
 
 naan be as profitably represented in Parliament as the borough of Old 
 Sarum ? And why might not our Synagogue be represented, with as 
 much safety to the State, and as little prejudice to the Church, as the 
 Kirk of Scotland? Are you afraid we should monopolize all the bo- 
 roughs, and swarm in St. Stephen's Chapel as we do in Capel Court? 
 Mr. Canning, at your next annual speech on Parliamentary Reform 
 to the Backbone Club of Liverpool, condescend to answer these 
 Rabbinical queries ! They will at any rate give some variety to the 
 topics usually introduced. 
 
 About half a century since, the emancipation of the Jews from civil 
 disabilities appeared probable ; but an alarm was raised on the sub- 
 ject of their naturalization, founded on the great danger of what I 
 have before alluded to, under the term " defeating prophecy." The 
 opposition to their claims was ably supported by a small pamphlet, 
 attributed to a Common Councilman of London, written with great 
 naivete, under a suitable text " These men, being Jews, do sorely 
 trouble our city.''
 
 LETTER VI 
 
 AS TO THE LIBERTY OF THE PRESS IN MATTERS OF 
 RELIGION THE CAUSES AND REMEDIES OF ITS 
 ABUSE ESPECIALLY CONSIDERED WITH RESPECT 
 TO UNBELIEVERS. 
 
 To William Wilberforce, Esq. 
 
 " Take heed to yourselves what ye intend to do as touching 
 these men. And now I say unto you, refrain from these men, 
 and let them alone : for if this counsel or this work (the 
 Christian Revelation) be of men, it will come to nought : but 
 if it be of GOD, ye cannot overthrow it : lest haply ye be found 
 even to fight against God." Acts of the Apostles, ch. v. 
 
 " And now the time in special is, by priviledge to write anil 
 speak what may help to the further discussing of matters in 
 agitation. The temple of Janus, with his two controversial 
 faces, might now not insignificantly be set open. And though 
 all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the 
 earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing 
 and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and 
 Falsehood grapple ; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in 
 a free and open encounter ? Her confuting is the best and 
 surest suppressing. For who knows not that Truth is strong, 
 next to the Almighty? she needs no policies, nor stratagems, 
 nor licensings, to make her victorious; those are the shifts and 
 the defences that error uses against her power." 
 
 AREOPAGITICA, a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed 
 Printing. MILTON. 
 
 SIR, I am now about to draw largely on your 
 Christian courage as well as patience ; but, secure
 
 109 
 
 in the entrenchments of argument and authority, I 
 do not despair of your countenance of my views, 
 and even of your alliance in furthering them. My 
 previous Letters will have prepared your mind for 
 the subject of this epistle ; and, however the cir- 
 cumstances of the times may occasion some readers 
 a little nervous trepidation, yet I am not hopeless 
 of converting even the most timid, be he but a 
 Christian, and one who resolves to conform his 
 opinions and practice to the rules of the Gospel. 
 
 My position is, " That the Christian religion 
 distinctly disavows, and utterly disclaims the <aid 
 and protection of civil pains, penalties, and re- 
 straints of every kind and in every degree" But 
 for the sake of a more perfect understanding, or 
 rather to prevent misunderstanding, I shall make 
 one preliminary exception : namely, of those cases 
 where, under pretence of opposing revelation, scep- 
 tical controversy is made the medium of private 
 slander or gross associations with vice : this must 
 undoubtedly be considered a civil offence contra 
 bonos mores over which the common law of the 
 land has ample and deserved cognizance. 
 
 In the discussion of this important question, and 
 in my remarks in the present Letter, I have refe- 
 rence only to the principle of religious freedom : I 
 disclaim all political allusions to the prosecutions 
 lately carried on by the crown, and the societies 
 whose object it is to protect public morals : any
 
 iio 
 
 reference, therefore, to these local occurrences, rests 
 with the reader, not with me. It is not here my 
 purpose to inquire how far the " Age of Reason," 
 " Palmer's Principles of Nature," and " The Deist's 
 Magazine," (the works lately prosecuted,) are within 
 or without the exception ahove made from tolera- 
 tion of infidelity. I wish to cast no reflection on 
 the juries of my fellow-countrymen who have con- 
 victed the publishers of these or other similar works: 
 if any of these convictions have been contrary to the 
 spirit and law of Christianity, I impugn not their 
 verdict, or the motives of their decision ; the fault 
 lies with the law' of their country, if indeed that 
 which usually passes for law on the subject is cor- 
 rectly defined. This law, as it is expounded to 
 them, they solemnly swear by the holy Scriptures 
 impartially to administer between the King and the 
 prisoner at the bar. I wish, however, to join issue 
 on the principle of these prosecutions : I will meet 
 Mr. Justice Bayley and the Attorney-General on 
 their own chosen ground I will encounter them 
 with their Own weapons and if " Christianity is 
 the law of the land" I here take my position, and 
 boldly tell them they have pronounced their own refu- 
 tation. Christianity disowns the principle of their 
 prosecutions, and teaches the very opposite doctrine. 
 I will prove this by the experience to be deduced 
 of the ill effects of persecution ; I will prove it from 
 the example and doctrine of Christ ; from the
 
 Ill 
 
 example and doctrine of the apostles and primitive' 
 Christians; and, lastly, I will show the anti-chris- 
 tianity and impolicy of these legal restraints from the 
 opinions and writings of the most eminent digni- 
 taries of the English Church, of men who, from their 
 zealous and superior advancement of the evidences 
 of revelation, must be allowed the best judges of 
 what means are most conducive to the common end 
 of all, viz. the highest cultivation and spread of its 
 divine and important truths. 
 
 I enter upon this discussion as a Christian; and 
 must again decline all contact with the state poli- 
 ticians who use revelation as an " arcanum irnperii," 
 to oil the wheels of government, and hoodwink the 
 understandings of the people. " No experiments! 
 is the language indeed of politicians, (for in some 
 things bigotry and politics agree, as extremes run 
 easily into one another, by their very endeavour to 
 keep at distance,) because, according to the poli- 
 tician's creed, religion being useful to the state, and 
 yet not founded in truth, all inquiries tend not to 
 confirm, but to unsettle this necessary support of 
 civil government. But can a man who believes 
 religion to have come from God use this lan- 
 guage*?" 
 
 It cannot be necessary for me to launch into any 
 metaphysical dissertation on the nature of the 
 
 * Bishop WARBURTON'S Remarks on Occasional Reflections, 
 Part II. page 134.
 
 112 
 
 human mind, or into any history of its progressive 
 cultivation and enlargement; the space of the " Uni- 
 versal History" itself would not suffice for the 
 importance of the subject : neither can any abstract 
 reasoning on the Liberty of the Press be at all 
 requisite in an era of civil and religious freedom 
 cotemporary with ERSKINE; and while the memo- 
 rable efforts of the " friends of the Liberty of the 
 Press" still survive in the grateful recollections of 
 the country. 
 
 Man, being intended for society, was created com- 
 municative. The gift of speech for some time gave 
 vent to this natural disposition, and was adequate to 
 its wants. As he multiplied and spread, this faculty 
 became too confined for the purposes of social life, 
 and signs were invented for a distant intercourse. 
 
 o 
 
 These signs were a long time the imperfect repre- 
 sentative and bare images of things. The 
 inadequacy of hieroglyphical writing soon urged 
 human ingenuity to the invention of the alphabet, 
 and letters became the signs of words, thoughts, and 
 things : thus was the invention of letters originally 
 founded in and as a mere auxiliary to the use of 
 speech; and from the want of additional facility in 
 the use of letters proceeded the Art of Printing. 
 To this never-ceasing fountain of knowledge and 
 virtue must be ascribed the extraordinary progress 
 of the world in the arts and sciences, in government, 
 and religion; and though artful politicians and
 
 113 
 
 bigoted priests may bemoan and oppose the progress 
 of our intellectual emancipation from darkness and 
 error, no artificial embankments of rubbish or 
 political craft can stem the rolling and rapid 
 current of improvement. To deny that there are 
 many evils accompanying a state of half- knowledge 
 in the People, would be weak in the extreme ; but 
 we must not forget to compare the hundredfold 
 greater evils of utter -ignorance with those of partial 
 learning ; and so far from prompting the abandon- 
 ment of popular instruction, the temporary incon- 
 veniences attending its progress ought the more to 
 stimulate our exertions in its acceleration. I can- 
 not, however, better express myself, than in words 
 of that magnificent sermon of Robert Hall, on the 
 Advantages of Knowledge to the Lower Classes : 
 " These are the likeliest, or rather the only expe- 
 dients that can be adopted, for forming a sound and 
 virtuous populace : and if there be any truth in the 
 figure, by which society is compared to a pyramid, 
 it is on them its x stability chiefly depends ; the ela- 
 borate ornament at the top will be a wretched 
 compensation for the want of solidity in the lower 
 parts of the structure. These are not the times in 
 which it is safe for a nation to repose on the lap of 
 ignorance. If there ever were a season when public 
 tranquillity was ensured by the absence of know- 
 ledge, that season is past. The convulsed state of 
 the world will not permit unthinking stupidity to
 
 114 
 
 sleep, without being appalled by phantoms, and 
 shaken by terrors, to which reason, which defines 
 her objects and limits her apprehensions by the 
 reality of things, is a stranger. Every thing in the 
 condition of mankind announces the approach of 
 some great crisis, for which nothing can prepare us 
 but the diffusion of knowledge, probity, and the fear 
 of the Lord. While the world is impelled, with 
 such violence, in opposite directions ; while a spirit 
 of giddiness and revolt is shed upon the nations, 
 and the seeds of mutation are so thickly sown, the 
 improvement of the mass of the People will be our 
 grand security, in the neglect of which the polite- 
 ness, the refinement, and the knowledge accumu- 
 lated in the higher orders, weak and unprotected, 
 will be exposed to imminent danger, and perish like 
 a garland in the grasp of popular fury. Wisdom 
 and knowledge shall be the stability of thy times, 
 and strength of salvation ; the fear of the Lord is 
 his treasure." 
 
 I never could conceive on what ground differ- 
 ences of opinion, as to a religion of which charity 
 is the very essence, should form an exception to the 
 toleration and liberty allowed mankind on all other 
 subjects of inquiry and belief; or why it should 
 originate such bitter and fatal resentments as the 
 history of religious persecution exposes to our view. 
 I never could discover on what rational ground a 
 free and unlimited range for the human mind was
 
 115 
 
 interdicted on the only subject which has been the 
 object of a revelation from the Deity to man ; and 
 in a religion where the Bible is the magnetic needle 
 and pole star of our course a subject, too, of all 
 others the most susceptible of the influences of pre- 
 judice and education*, of passion and feeling, and 
 which on that very account calls for the most free 
 and unrestricted liberty, as the vital air of its respi- 
 ration. Surveying the animosities of Christian 
 warfare and contention, one would be apt to suppose 
 that the professors of Christianity were labouring 
 the literal accomplishment of a text in scripture 
 (Matt. x. 34.), " Think not that I am come to send 
 peace on earth : I came not to send peace, but a 
 sword." Their dreadful prostitution of the name 
 and character of our holy religion has certainly made 
 good the prediction, that " whoso killeth you will 
 think he doth God good service." Surely the world 
 must be well nigh convinced of the folly of allowing 
 a magisterial prescription and patent in Christianity. 
 Dear-bought experience has shown the utter incom- 
 petency of human tribunals, of judges, juries, and 
 gaolers, in matters of religion. This right of the 
 magistrate to force all men to religion would place 
 himself on the funeral pile of his own principles, if 
 
 * " Whatever was the creed of their father, or tutor, that will be 
 theirs from their infancy to their lives' end. Ninety-nine in an hun- 
 dred of those who are Christians, would probably have been Maho- 
 metans if they had been born in Turkey, and would have imbibed 
 their religion, as they do their native tongue, along with their mother's 
 milk." Dedication to Essay on Spirit by a late Bishop of Clogher.
 
 116 
 
 he chanced to visit a country where the state religion 
 differed from his own : it is an equal justification 
 of the Mahometan and the pagan sacrifices of the 
 idolater.* if an English magistrate may use the 
 sword of state against one who disavows and 
 impugns his religion, a Madagascar Chief has an 
 equal title. Where is the definition of " heresy" 
 and " blasphemy" to lie ? This system would de- 
 scribe it by geographical boundaries. It is one of 
 perpetual re-action ; for the persecuted, as they get 
 uppermost, have always revenged themselves on their 
 persecutors. " Christians," says Archbishop Tillot- 
 son, " are commonly most hot and furious for that 
 of which there is the least certainty." The streets 
 of Hamburgh have been deluged with blood in a 
 fanatical contest whether the Lord's Prayer should 
 be said backwards or forwards. The carnage in 
 
 o 
 
 the early contentions of the Eastern and Western 
 Churches has been the argument against the ten- 
 
 O O 
 
 dency and spirit of the Gospel, whence many an 
 unbeliever has fenced himself around resisting all 
 
 o 
 
 approach. The massacres of St. Bartholomew, the 
 dreadful persecutions of the Vaudois, and of the 
 peaceful inhabitants of the valleys of Piedmont*, the 
 burnings of the Protestant by the Catholic and vice 
 
 * It was on the cruel massacre of these truly evangelical Christians 
 (1655) that Milton wrote that beautiful sonnet: 
 
 " Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter'd saints, whose hones 
 
 Lie scatter'd on the Alpine mountains cold ; 
 ;j Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old, 
 When all our fathers worshipp'd stocks and stones
 
 117 
 
 vers, mutatis , mutandis have tearfully shovfn us 
 the truth of the apostolic warning* " If ye bite and 
 devour one another, take heed that ye be not con- 
 sumed one of another." The frequent raging of 
 these cruel persecutions was but too truly described 
 by an old writer, as that which " had brought 
 Christians to a butchery one of another, and made a 
 mere shambles of Christendom." 
 
 " Where art them fled, fair Charity ? sweet breath, 
 That stills the stormy soul ! soft eye of peace ! 
 That weep'stat all this mischief! seest man's pride 
 Mistaken for religion ! whispering low 
 In the calm voice of universal love, 
 Soft as the tepid zephyr's downy wing ; 
 The odorous breezes of thy balmy gale 
 Fly scatter'd wide in persecution's blast." 
 
 I shall now proceed to show that the most 
 extended liberty, even to unbelievers, in the enter- 
 tainment, publication, and defence of their opinions, 
 is the only cure of these afflicting evils. It is not 
 pretended that irreligious publications are in them- 
 
 " Forget not : in thy book record their groans, 
 Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold 
 Slain by the bloody Piedmontese, that roll'd 
 Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans 
 
 " The vales redoubled to the hills, and they 
 
 To heaven. Their martyr'd blood and ashes sow 
 O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway 
 
 " The triple Tyrant ; that from these may grow 
 A hundredfold, who, having learn'd thy way, 
 Early may fly the Babylonian woe." 
 
 * Gal. v. 15,
 
 118 
 
 selves perfectly harmless : but, allowing them to do a 
 certain quantity of mischief, our argument is, that on 
 a balance of the evils resulting from the permission 
 and forcible repression of the works of unbelievers, 
 the preponderance is greatly against their repression : 
 the principle which would justify repressing them 
 maybe brought to bear against revelation itself; and 
 the question is not, whether sceptical works make 
 sceptics? but, whether, from their free allowance 
 and circulation, such an attention is not excited to 
 the study and practice of Christianity, that the con- 
 verts from indifference and ignorance of religious 
 truth greatly outnumber those who unfortunately 
 quit their hold of it ? Here is the jet of the argu- 
 ment, so well expressed in the parable of the 
 tares. Let them grow together till the harvest, for 
 the reason assigned by our Saviour, who doubtless 
 foresaw the evil of countenancing persecution, 
 " lest the wheat be endangered by the extirpation 
 of the tares." The more useful and necessary the 
 cultivation of any science becomes to the world, the 
 more probable and dangerous is its perversion. 
 Divinity, Law, and Physic, are notorious instances 
 of this fact. And how is this perversion to be 
 detected and remedied, if the Press is in the hands 
 only of those who profit by it? They who earn 
 truth by their own ardour and industry, are the most 
 influenced by it ; and, on the contrary, those who
 
 119 
 
 only inherit an opinion as they do their name have 
 the least knowledge of its worth. Were this con- 
 stant alarm of the dangers of discussion permitted 
 to palsy and suppress all opposition to our own 
 individual sense of right, we should soon be immersed 
 in barbarism and slavishness ; and works of the 
 highest moment would be strangled in their birth, 
 lest, as a Bishop of Winchester said of the Essay on 
 the Human Understanding, it might be applied to 
 other uses than what the author designed ! a 
 species of pains and penalties by anticipation, even 
 worse than an ex post facto legislation. To op- 
 pose force to sound reasoning, is unjust; to answer 
 false reasoning by force is impolitic as well as unjust. 
 A bad cause is quickly refuted a good cause 
 readily defended. The technical distinctions 
 regarding discussion and publication are not worth 
 examination here : I shall proceed to show that 
 Christianity, though it can safely endure persecution, 
 can never exercise or warrant any without the 
 violation of its spirit and design ; and that the 
 Christian name never was more scandalized than 
 when prostituted to justify violence and blindness. 
 It has been well observed, that punishment for 
 opinion may be of ecclesiastical, but could never be 
 of Christian pedigree. It affords the unbeliever his 
 strongest argument ; he can never be dislodged, if 
 persecution is warranted by Christianity. " You,"
 
 120 
 
 he says, " challenge me to fight you first tie my 
 hands behind me, and then boast of the punishment 
 you have given me : it is easy for those to win who 
 bowl alone !" The learned Dr. Clagget, in his 
 Persuasive to an Ingenuous Trial, writes : " They 
 that have a good cause, will not fright men from con- 
 ^sidering what their adversaries say by their books, 
 but rather encourage them so to do, that they may 
 see the difference between truth and error, reason 
 and falsehood, with their own eyes. This is the 
 effect of a well-grounded confidence in truth. It is a 
 bad sign when men are loath to have their opinions 
 seen in the day, but love darkness more than light." 
 The space of this Letter will not allow me room to 
 trace the stunting system of licensing. The primi- 
 tive councils were accustomed to mention any 
 books they thought of dangerous tendency, and to 
 recommend such as they esteemed deserving of 
 notice. The council of Trent, as narrated by Father 
 Paul, extended to the eye the priestly dominion which 
 had been exercised over the judgment, in burning 
 and prohibiting every tiling which did not meet their 
 taste and humour, " raking through the entrails of 
 many a good old author, with a violation worse than 
 any that could be offered to his tomb." Pope 
 Martin V. was the first pontiff who by his bull 
 excommunicated the reading of heretical books. 
 The Church of Rome and the Spanish Inquisition,
 
 121 
 
 
 
 afterwards engendering together, brought forth the 
 well-known catalogues and indices expurgatorii. 
 Milton, remonstrating against the importation of the 
 system into England, writes : " We have it not, that 
 can be heard of, from any ancient state, polity, 
 or church, nor any statute left us by our ancestors, 
 elder or later ; nor from the modern custom of any 
 reformed city or church abroad ; but from the 
 most anti-christian council, and the most tyrannous 
 inquisition that ever inquired. Till then books 
 were ever as freely admitted into the world as any 
 other birth ; the issue of the brain "was no more 
 stifled than the issue of the womb : no envious junto 
 sate cross-legged over the nativity of any man's 
 intellectual offspring." 
 
 Jeremy Taylor, in the preface to the Liberty of 
 Prophesying, (first edition, 1647,) holds the same 
 opinions with his great contemporary and political 
 opponent : " Thus farre I thought I had reason on 
 my side, and I suppose I have made it good upon 
 its proper grounds, in the pages following. But 
 then if the result be, that men must be permitted in 
 their opinions, and that Christians must not 
 persecute Christians ; I have also as much reason to 
 reprove all those oblique arts which are not direct 
 persecutions of men's persons, but they are indirect 
 proceedings, ungentle and unchristian, servants of 
 faction and interest, provocations to zeal and 
 animosities, and destructive of learning and inge-
 
 122 
 
 nuity. And these are suppressing all the monuments 
 of their adversaries, forcing them to recant, and 
 burning their books" p. 34. 
 
 " I am sure such things were never taught us by 
 Christ and his apostles ; and if we were sure that 
 ourselves spoke truth, or that truth were able to 
 justifie herself, it were better if to preserve a 
 doctrine wee did not destroy a commandement, and 
 out of zeale pretending to Christian religion, loose 
 the glories and rewards of ingenuity and Christian 
 simplicity." p. 35. 
 
 " It is but an illiterate policy to think that such 
 indirect and uningenuous proceedings can amongst 
 wise and free men disgrace the authors, and disre- 
 pute their discourses ; and I have seen that the 
 price hath been trebled upon a forbidden or a con- 
 demned book ; and some men in policy have got a 
 prohibition that their impression might be the more 
 certainly vendible, and the author himselfe thought 
 considerable. The best way is to leave tricks and 
 devices, and to fall upon that way which the best 
 ages of the Church did use : with the strength 
 of argument, and allegations of Scripture, and 
 modesty of deportment, and meeknesse, and charity 
 to the persons of men, they converted misbelievers, 
 stopped the mouths of adversaries, asserted truth, 
 and discountenanced errour ; and those other 
 stratagems and arts of support and maintenance to 
 doctrines, were the issues of hereticall braines ; the
 
 123 
 
 old Catholicks had nothing to secure themselves 
 but lv psya, of truth and plaine dealing." p. 36. 
 
 " In England, al though v the Pope had as great 
 power here as any where, yet there were no execu- 
 tions for matters of opinion known till the time of 
 Henry the Fourth, who (because he usurped the 
 crown) was willing by all means to endeare the 
 Clergy by destroying their enemies, that so he might 
 be sure of them to all his purposes. And indeed it 
 may become them well enough who are wiser in 
 their generations than the children of light, it may 
 possibly serve the pollicies of evill persons ; but never 
 the pure and chaste designs of Christianity, which 
 admits no blood but Christ's, and the imitating 
 blood of martyrs, but knowes nothing how to serve 
 her ends, by persecuting any of her erring children." 
 p. 26. 
 
 " Let all errours be as much and as zealously 
 suppressed as may be, (the doctrine of the following 
 discourse contradicts not that,) but let it be done by 
 such meanes as are proper instruments of their sup- 
 pression, by preaching and disputation (so that 
 neither of them breed disturbance), by charity and 
 sweetness, by holinesse of life, assiduity of exhorta- 
 tion, by the word of God and Prayer." p. 28. 
 
 The utter fruitlessness of attempts to suppress 
 discussion was most signally manifested during the 
 dominion of the licensing system in England, in the 
 publication of some of the most standard works on
 
 124 
 
 political liberty. It can only tend to make a 
 wonder long-lived ; and, as Lord Bacon writes, 
 " the punishment of wits enhances their authority, 
 and a forbidden writing is thought to be a certain 
 spark of truth that flies up in the faces of 
 them who seek to tread it out." Milton says it 
 reminded him of the sagacious country gentleman, 
 who thought by shutting his park gate to pound up 
 the crows. 
 
 I shall now briefly enumerate the frequent occa- 
 sions on which our Lord discountenanced persecution 
 and force, and the aid of the secular power. It cannot 
 be denied that love and charity are the spirit of the 
 Christian dispensation, and that the passive virtues 
 were those of all others the most earnestly cultivated 
 by Jesus Christ. He appealed to the hearts and 
 the understandings of his hearers : he submitted his 
 doctrine to the test of their reason ; and he said 
 " If I do not speak truth, do not believe me." 
 " The works which I do bear witness of me." The 
 four Gospels, containing the history of his doctrine 
 and practice, may in vain be ransacked for the 
 slightest justification of coercion, either as regards 
 the inward or exterior profession of his religion. It 
 was to the excellency of his doctrine, and to the 
 spotless purity of his life, he alone appealed for 
 support and popular influence. In the calling and 
 selection of his earliest disciples he made use of no 
 compulsion, not even the employment of miraculous
 
 125 
 
 power: he did not drive them before him, but his? 
 words were, " Follow me." (Matt. iv. 19.) When 
 he gave them their first commission, with super- 
 natural power, to preach the Gospel, he said to 
 them (c. x.), " Freely ye have received, freely give : 
 provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass, in your 
 purses ; nor scrip for your journey ; neither shoes, 
 nor yet staves. If a house be not worthy, let your 
 peace return to you. Whosoever shall not receive 
 you, nor, hear your words, shake off the dust of 
 your feet. Behold I send you forth as sheep in the 
 midst of 'wolves; be ye harmless as doves." In 
 his counsel to them concerning the reproof of the 
 wrong-doer, he says (c. xviii. v. 1?.), " Tell it to 
 the church, and if he neglect to hear the church, 
 let him be unto thee as an heathen man and a pub- 
 lican :" as Bishop Mann renders the meaning 
 " Let him be put out of the church, and his com- 
 pany avoided, as the Jews avoid that of a heathen 
 and a Roman tax-gatherer." When the disciples, 
 James and John, visited with him the village of the 
 Samaritans, and indignantly witnessed its reluctance 
 to receive their Lord and Master, they said (Luke, 
 xix. 54.), " Lord, wilt thou that we command 
 fire to come down from heaven, and consume 
 them ? He turned and rebuked them, and 
 said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye 
 are of; for the Son of Man is not come to destroy 
 men's lives, but to save them." In that beautiful
 
 126 
 
 narrative of his discourse with the woman of 
 Samaria at the well, our Saviour especially dis- 
 tinguishes the uselessness of external profession 
 without an inward feeling of religion influencing 
 the conduct. " God is a Spirit : and they that 
 worship him, must worship him in spirit and in 
 truth." (John, iv. 24.) When many of his 
 followers deserted him, and the disciples were seized 
 with distrust and panic, he sought to detain them 
 by no species of compulsion, but, appealing to his 
 works, he said (c. xvi. v. 67.), " Will ye also go 
 away?" When the Jews were obstinately incre- 
 dulous, he publicly declared to them (c. xii. v. 47.), 
 " If any man hear my words, and believe not, I 
 judge him not; for I came not to judge the world, 
 but to save the world." He again distinctly informs 
 them their punishment would not be in this world, 
 but in that to come : " He that rejecteth me, and 
 receiveth not my words, hath one that judgeth him : 
 the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge 
 him in the last day." (v. 48.) In that affecting con- 
 versation with the apostles, wherein he predicted 
 his approaching sufferings, he prepared them for 
 the opposition of the world, and gave them the most 
 strengthening assurance that it would avail nothing 
 against them : " Do ye now believe ? These things 
 I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have 
 peace: in the world ye shall have tribulation; but 
 be of good cheer, I have overcome the world."
 
 127 
 
 (c. xvi. v. 33.)* In fact, there is but one solitary 
 instance throughout the whole Gospel narrative that 
 can countenance the application of force, viz. in 
 our Saviour's expulsion from the Temple of the 
 buyers and sellers who had profaned its most sacred 
 recesses. Perhaps no passage in Scripture has more 
 
 * The famous text, Luke, xiv. 23, (the parable of the great supper, 
 where the servant is instructed to " compel them to come in,") urged 
 by the Romanists and others in support of religious persecution, is 
 well known to have been perverted and wrested to an incongruous 
 and absurd sense, to make it countenance and justify the offering of 
 violence to the natural and religious rights of mankind. The word 
 Mnywairoy means nothing more than persuade or prevail upon, 
 persuade or prevail upon them to come in, as is plain to a demonstra- 
 tion, not only from the context, but also from a numerous collection 
 of texts in Dr. Clarke's admirable sermon, drawn both from the Old 
 and New Testament, in which this same or some similar expression 
 occurs. See, too, Le Clerc's excellent animadversions, and Grotius's, 
 Whitby's, and Wolzogenius's Annotations ad loc. 
 
 Le Clerc and Wetstein have produced a passage from Horace, 
 where cogo is manifestly used in the same sense as here in St. Luke : 
 
 " Nam cum rogat, et prece cogit, 
 
 Scilicet ut tibi se laudare, et tradere coner, &c. 
 
 Epist. i. 9, 
 To which I can add another from Ovid : 
 
 " Cui dea, Due, inquit; scisti, qua cogere posses : 
 Seque levat saxo, subsequiturque senem." 
 
 Fast. IV. 527, 528. 
 
 Perpello, as is well known, has the same signification : "Adhoc, 
 collegam suura Antonium pactione provincial perpulerat, ne contra 
 rempublicara sentiret.'' SALLUST. B. C. 27. edit. Wasse. "Jam 
 inter haec eminus petebatur ; quum testudine objecta milites, qui, ut 
 inde discederet,j3erpeZ/ere nequiverant, tuebantur." CURT. V. iii. 9. 
 Compello has the same acceptation in the following passage of the 
 last-mentioned author: " Alexander, cum et classem procul haberet, 
 et longam obsidionem magno sibi ad caetera impedimento videret fore, 
 caduceatores, qui ad pacem eos compelleret, misit." IV. ii. 15. 
 j , Dissertation on Persecution, by THOMAS EDWARDS, D.D. 1766.
 
 128 
 
 difficulty in its exact application than this act of our 
 Lord's, so apparently inconsistent with the whole 
 tenour of his life and doctrine. But, to avoid the 
 polemical controversy connected with its explanation, 
 I shall not enter into its merits, satisfied that the evan- 
 gelist could intend no sanction of the employment of 
 religious persecution, contradicted by the whole con- 
 text of his preceding narrative. If there ever were 
 instances of apostasy calling for severity of punish- 
 ment, it was in the frequent unfaithfulness of the 
 apostles to the evident impressions of their senses in 
 the miracles of our Lord ; yet on no occasion did 
 he resent it with force. On the contrary, he meekly 
 satisfied the incredulity of Thomas, and afforded 
 him sensible proof of his resurrection in an instance 
 of most obdurate unbelief. And before I close 
 these remarks on the anti-christianity of pains and 
 penalties, I cannot forbear citing some incidents in 
 the life of Peter. The rebuke of Jesus Christ to 
 that zealous disciple, on his attacking the servant of 
 the High Priest, is too well known to require any 
 commentary : but there are some circumstances in 
 the denial of Christ by Peter not commonly ob- 
 servant. If ever there was an instance of decided 
 blasphemy and infidelity, it was on that memorable 
 occasion a denial of his Lord and Master, after 
 the most miraculous proofs afforded of his super- 
 human character, and after the most zealous pro- 
 fessions of support. Our Lord had predicted the
 
 129 
 
 consequences of his over-zeal : and when Peter had 
 denied him in the hall of the High Priest, " the 
 Lord turned, and looked upon Peter ! and Peter 
 remembered the word of the Lord, how he had 
 said unto him. And he went out, and wept bit- 
 terly." (Luke, xxii. 61.) The remorse and 
 fears of the unhappy apostle were doubtless of the 
 most piercing agony. The persecutor would say, 
 that his flagrant apostasy called for the most signal 
 vengeance, both as a punishment, and a warning to 
 others. Not so the principles of Christianity. And 
 there is an incident in the account of the resurrec- 
 tion connected with this distressing scene, the most 
 touching and unartificial coincidence in the whole 
 internal evidence of Scripture. Early in the 
 morning, when the women visited the sepulchre, 
 the first appearance of our Lord's resurrection 
 addressed them " Be not affrighted : ye seek 
 Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified ; he is 
 risen, he is not here. But go your way; tell his 
 disciples, and PETER, that he goeth before you into 
 Galilee : there ye shall see him." (Mark, xvi. 6.) 
 The mixture of sublime generosity and deep 
 knowledge of human character discernible in 
 this affecting anecdote is most truly striking. 
 Our Lord doubtless foresaw, in this former con- 
 duct of his fallen disciple, a debasing consciousness 
 of self-degradation that would have banished; Peter 
 from his presence. Peter " came running to the 
 
 K
 
 130 
 
 sepulchre," oppressed with grateful contrition. The 
 fourth evangelist continues the same undesigned 
 and beautiful consistency in the narrative of a 
 subsequent appearance to the apostles, in the repe- 
 tition of that searching question, " Simon Peter, 
 lovest thou me? And he said unto him, Lord, 
 thou knowest all things ; thou knowest that I love 
 thee. Jesus said unto him, Feed my sheep !" 
 (John, xxi. 17.) I have quoted this artless and 
 inimitable story, from its unanswerable support 
 of my position. Peter was restored to the bosom 
 of the church. This was the disciple who after- 
 wards, by his zealous and apostolic exertions, made 
 such ample atonement for his former errors, and so 
 full a return for the generous forgiveness of his 
 divine Master the same disciple who counsels the 
 Asiatic Gentiles, " Feed the flock of God which is 
 among you, taking the oversight thereof, not by 
 constraint, but willingly." (1 Peter, v. 2.) 
 
 Thus, Sir, have I incontestably proved the ex- 
 ample of Christ opposed to persecution : his doc- 
 trine, as taught in that divine sermon on the Mount, 
 was, " Love your enemies, do good to them which 
 hate you, bless them that curse you, and pray for 
 them, which despitefully use you. Give to every 
 man that asketh of thee ; and of him that taketh 
 away thy goods, ask them not again ; and as ye 
 would that men should do to you, do ye to them 
 likewise. Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father
 
 331 
 
 also is merciful. Judge not, and ye shall not be 
 judged ; condemn not, and ye shall not be con- 
 demned ; forgive, and ye shall be forgiven." (Luke, 
 vi.) Christ repeatedly reminded his disciples, 
 " Ye are witnesses of these things ;" and his last 
 parting injunction was, " Go ye into all the world, 
 and preach the Gospel to every creature/' Who 
 is therefore guilty of blasphemous calumny, in im- 
 puting force to the permission of the Gospel ? If 
 its sanction is there to be discovered, a greater 
 mass of hypocrisy than the New Testament never 
 was put together. In an old tract against the 
 presentments of a Middlesex Grand Jury a century 
 since, are some most apposite remarks. It says : 
 " To suppose the practice of punishing men for not 
 professing the Christian religion, or for professing 
 the contrary, to be pleasing in the eyes of our 
 Saviour, we must suppose him to have spoke thus 
 to his apostles : ' Go ye and teach all nations : 
 preach up the duties which I have commanded 
 you, and which you have seen me practise, meek- 
 ness, charity, and mutual forbearance of one another. 
 And to convince men the better, lo ! I give you the 
 power of working miracles, whereby the divinity of 
 your mission may be evident to the senses, as well 
 as reason of mankind. Behold, I send you forth 
 as sheep among wolves : Be ye therefore wise as 
 serpents, and harmless as doves. But mark me : 
 I would not have you keep to this behaviour too
 
 132 
 
 long. What I direct now is only for twenty, 
 or thirty, or a hundred, or two hundred years, 
 according as you succeed in bringing over the 
 powers of the world to your side ; as soon as that 
 is done, you must be quite other sort of men. 
 Don't suffer any body to say a word against my 
 religion : or if he do, and offer to bring never so 
 plausible reasons for his infidelity, take care he 
 be dispatched, or soundly chastised some way or 
 other by sword or famine, poison or present- 
 ment.'" ' 
 
 Thus I have contrasted the life and doctrines of 
 our Saviour with the conduct of modern Christians. 
 It cannot be necessary to enter at any length into 
 the subsequent practice of the apostles, since it 
 cannot be doubted, by Christians, that they strictly 
 followed the precepts of their divine Teacher. 
 Throughout the Acts of the Apostles and the 
 Epistles, they are represented as courting the most 
 public examination of their opinions and testi- 
 mony, and they every where addressed themselves 
 to the understandings of their hearers. Indeed, 
 an hierarchical principle of obedience to state 
 religion would have come ill from those who 
 appealed to the natural right of propagating truth, 
 and who publicly sought to overturn the religious 
 establishments of the whole world. As St. Paul 
 accounts charity the very corner-stone of Chris- 
 tianity, so, on the other hand, he rates persecution
 
 133 
 
 as the vilest crime ; and it was for the commission 
 of this offence he describes himself (1 Tim. i. 15.} 
 the " chief of sinners." When brought before the 
 kings of the earth to answer for his " seditious and 
 blasphemous" attempts against their native gods, 
 does he not on all occasions plead the liberty of 
 human nature ? In his apostolic character, although 
 frequently called upon to reprove the additions and 
 subtractions made to Christianity by the heathen 
 superstitions and mistaken zeal of the primitive 
 converts, he no where enjoins pains or penalties, 
 but, in the utmost severity of indignant anger, 
 he counsels them to expel all the obdurate (after 
 repeated exhortations) from the communion of the 
 church ; he enjoins them not to associate with 
 blasphemers and evil-doers, but their judgment 
 and punishment he always concedes to the tribunal 
 of the last day. " Be ready always to give aa 
 answer to every man that asketh you a reason 
 of the hope that is in you with meekness and 
 respect." (1 Pet. iii. 15.) But the Scripture 
 no where says, When the unbeliever states to you 
 his doubts and objections, destroy his books and 
 imprison his body : no ; Christianity distinctly de- 
 clares, " The weapons of our warfare are not 
 carnal." (2 Cor. x. 4.) The apostolic church was a 
 spiritual militia of volunteers, not of pressed men ; 
 and it was a noted saying of St. Ambrose, " Fides 
 voluntatis est, non necessitatis." But two instances
 
 134 
 
 only can be cited having the least countenance 
 of persecution the awful visitations, on Ananias 
 and Sapphira by Peter, and the punishment of 
 Elymas the sorcerer, struck blind by Paul. Their 
 entire irrelevancy, however, to the argument, is 
 known by every critical reader, and may be seen in 
 Chandler's Introduction to Limborch, and Bishop 
 Barlow's Treatise on Toleration. They were mira- 
 culous incidents under peculiar circumstances ; and, 
 if the narratives are attentively read, will be seen 
 to originate more in the immediate act of the Deity 
 than with the apostles. The first planters of Chris- 
 tianity resided and lived with Pagan idolaters ; the 
 Epistles are filled with exhortations to gain them 
 over to the faith by Christian conversation ; and 
 it would puzzle the persecutor to explain how 
 converts were originally made, if the primitive 
 believers were interdicted the society of Jews and 
 Pagans. 
 
 I am aware of the arguments drawn from the 
 Old Testament in favour of coercion by the civil 
 magistrate ; but he who cannot discover the total 
 opposition of the two covenants in the inspired 
 writings themselves, never will be convinced by me. 
 I shall not, therefore, enter on an endless desert of 
 controversy. The books of the Old Testament are 
 of various and partial authority some historical, 
 others prophetical. The Jewish religion was a 
 mixture of human and Divine law : Christ declares
 
 135 
 
 his kingdom not of this world. The great object 
 of the Jewish law appears to have been directed to 
 the preservation of one nation in the belief and 
 worship of one God, and, by a series of periodical 
 revelations, finally to lay there the foundation of 
 the Christian religion; from whence, as from a 
 centre, might afterwards radiate, in proportion to 
 the increasing maturity of human reason, the same 
 light and knowledge throughout the whole earth. 
 To this great end, much ceremonial and ritual form 
 was necessary in the early ages of the world, when 
 the human understanding was only impressible 
 through a sensible medium. But as mankind 
 emerged from ignorance and barbarism, and the 
 effulgent light of the Christian revelation spread 
 itself far and wide, these forms and ceremonies 
 became useless burthens, and were superseded by 
 the Gospel liberty. St. Paul, in explaining this 
 gradual maturity and completion of the scheme 
 of Providence, exhorts his fellow Christians 
 " Stand fast, therefore, in the liberty wherewith 
 Christ has made you free, and be not again the 
 slaves of bondage." True it is, that our Saviour 
 declared to the Scribes and Pharisees, that he 
 came not to destroy the law, but to support the 
 law : this explains nothing, till some definition 
 is attained of the meaning of the law alluded to. 
 The Jewish theocracy was a mixture of the poli- 
 tical, the ceremonial, and the moral law. It cannot
 
 136 
 
 be contended that our Saviour, who predicted the 
 present dispersion of the Jews that standing mi- 
 racle of Christianity ever meditated the conti- 
 nuance of their political power ; or that, in the 
 prophecy of the total destruction of the temple at 
 Jerusalem, when he wept over the prophetic antici- 
 pation of his country's ruin, he ever contemplated 
 the perpetuity of the ceremonial law : there re- 
 mains, therefore, only one choice of this threefold 
 mixture the MORAL law. The analogy of natural 
 and revealed religion is the grand basis of our 
 belief; and is the argument so ably managed by 
 the great Bishop Butler. The authority of the 
 commandments, recognised in the New Testament, 
 is acknowledged, not as civil, but as moral law. 
 The great author of revelation is equally the author 
 of natural religion ; and reason is itself described 
 in the sacred writings as the " inspiration of the 
 Lord, which giveth us understanding." In this 
 light, the Gospel system assumes and incorporates 
 with itself every precept of the Mosaic law, which 
 is declared of universal and perpetual obligation. 
 When the mission of the Messiah was accom- 
 plished, " the sceptre departed from Judah." 
 For the violation of the moral law alone are 
 we amenable to human tribunals ; our faith and 
 motives are the subjects of future jurisdiction. The 
 practice of the moral law is alone necessary to the 
 civil character, and its violations only ought to be
 
 137 
 
 the ground of civil disabilities and punishments. 
 Will our clerical tutors and professors teach us the 
 love of our country and of truth from the classic 
 examples of Greece and Rome, and yet deny that 
 an unbeliever can be a good man, or a trust-worthy 
 citizen? If they would so convince us, let them 
 prosecute the works of Cornelius Nepos and Plu- 
 tarch let them burn the Morals of Plato, Seneca, 
 and Marcus Antoninus and interdict the books of 
 Euclid, because they do not come through the 
 medium of revelation. Miserable and devastating 
 bigotry, which would make man a mere cultivated 
 ape, and the restraints of the dog-kennel his only 
 safe abode ! I shall close this argument, drawn 
 from scripture, with an extract from Bishop Bar- 
 low's tract on Toleration, 1692 : " We find no 
 warrant for it in the Gospel ; there is neither any 
 precept or practice of our ^Saviour, or his apostles, 
 to compel any to be Christians. The means they 
 used, either to convert Pagans, or continue and 
 confirm Christians, were constant preaching and a 
 rational pressing that truth to others, which they 
 had received from God, and believed themselves; 
 a prudent and meek disputing, and reasoning men 
 out of their errors, a pious life, and patient suffering 
 for the truth they preached : verbo et exemplo age- 
 bant, non gladio ; it was their Christian patience, 
 not any coactive violence, which converted the 
 world ; it was dying themselves, not killing others.
 
 138 
 
 which planted and propagated the Gospel : sanguis 
 martyrum semen eccksia ; it was the blood of the 
 martyrs, not of murdered heretics, which made the 
 field of the church so fruitful : and by what autho- 
 rity we should do that now which they thought not 
 fit to do then, I know not. Certainly, as they best 
 knew what means were most proportionable and 
 congruous both for the plantation and propagation 
 of the Gospel, so we have reason to believe that 
 those mediums they made use of were such ; and, 
 on the other side, we may rationally conclude, that 
 had there been any other means as congruous and 
 conducible to the end they aimed at, as those they 
 used, they would not have omitted them. Seeing, 
 then, neither Christ nor his apostles ever com- 
 manded, or (by their example or practice) com- 
 mended violence, or any coactive means to make or 
 confirm Christians, \ve have great reason to believe 
 that they conceived such means not congruous ; and 
 if so, why should any think otherwise?" I cannot 
 refrain from here noticing the sad effects of a bigotry 
 which restricts the investigation of many authors, 
 from whom the youthful reader would gain the most 
 virtuous impressions. The writings of Lord Shaftes- 
 bury, Lord Herbert, Bolingbroke, of Hume, and 
 many modern unbelievers, contain inestimable dis- 
 sertations on morals and the human mind ; but 
 such is the timorous prescription of parents and 
 tutors, that the index expurgatorius of mental
 
 139 
 
 cowardice prohibits the use of what made some atone- 
 ment for their infidelity. What is the consequence ? 
 The youthful mind, when it escapes the thraldom of 
 tutorage, instantly seeks this forbidden fruit ; and, 
 totally unprepared for the snares of sophism, too 
 often falls an easy sacrifice. This is notoriously true ; 
 and the literary character knows that " blasphemy 
 and infidelity" are too often discoverable where 
 genius and talent reside. But were we educated 
 with more mental confidence of inquiry, the reverse 
 would be the case; for Christians cannot pass such 
 a sentence on their religion, as to say that examina- 
 tion makes unbelievers : half-knowledge, dogmatism, 
 conceit, and the first excursions of a speculative 
 mind, may travel out of the road ; but the most 
 powerful attestation of the truth of revelation is the 
 recorded faith of the talent, the genius, and the taste 
 of Bacon, Newton, Boyle, Locke, and Milton, 
 whose preponderance of intellect and accomplish* 
 ment is, to such men as Hume, Gibbon, Rousseau, 
 Voltaire, and Frederick "the Great," "as the small 
 dust of the balance against the mountains, the faint 
 glimmerings of a taper to the effulgence of a mid- 
 day sun !" We live in an age of the most sifting and 
 wide-spreading inquiry : Christianity, in common 
 with all other subjects of human knowledge, must 
 be submitted to the ordeal. The first miraculous 
 promulgation of the Gospel, per se, converted the 
 primitive believers ; but the age of miracles having
 
 140 
 
 ceased, and no sane believer of the present day pre- 
 tending to super-human apprehension, demonstrative 
 evidence is no longer attainable : moral conviction 
 is the extent of our faith, derived from the writings 
 and traditions of eye-witnesses, and the internal 
 evidence of the writings themselves. Indeed, the 
 strongest arguments have been used to show the 
 wisdom of this limited quantum of proof that it 
 ensures an investigation and influence of religion 
 which would not be bestowed on it if sensible de- 
 monstration was afforded of its truth. Archbishop 
 Tillotson well observes, if our religion is too 
 good to be examined, it is too bad to be believed ; 
 and Bishop Burnet expresses the same sentiments: 
 " Indeed, it reflects great dishonour on any ancient 
 system of things, whether religious or civil, or philo- 
 sophical, if they will not bear a strict and free 
 examination ; and whatever fools, bigots, or hypo- 
 crites may say or pretend, it is in the highest degree 
 scandalous, and prejudicial to true religion and the 
 interest of society, to prevent or even discourage 
 such examination; and persecution for so bad a 
 purpose, is destructive of that liberty which all man- 
 kind are entitled to, and consequently a crime of 
 the most malignant nature." Arch. Philoso. Dedi- 
 cation to King WILLIAM. 
 
 The limits of a pamphlet will not embrace the 
 ppinions of the Christian fathers in favour of 
 religious liberty : but the reader will find them in
 
 141 
 
 Limborch's History of the Inquisition. This is not 
 an age in which the fathers command much 
 authority; but the most learned and enlightened 
 among them include the unbeliever within the 
 
 o 
 
 boundaries of liberty : and neither in Origen nor 
 Eusebius can be discovered any demand of magis- 
 terial help. Chillingworth, that powerful pioneer of 
 Protestantism, says, " I have learned from the 
 ancient fathers of the Church, that nothing is more 
 against religion than to force religion." 
 
 I have, Sir, extended this Letter to considerable 
 length, and have not been sparing of numerous 
 quotations ; but the vital importance of the subject 
 needs no excuse : and conscious of the strong preju- 
 dices of the religious world against this free per- 
 mission of scepticism, I have rather reasoned the 
 question from the arguments of others than 
 obtruded my own individual views. 1 shall now 
 proceed to show, that so far from this permission 
 being a latitudinarian opinion and innovation, it is 
 the firm and avowed opinion of the greatest orna- 
 ments of the English Church, and the truest friends 
 of revelation. I have made one exception to this 
 liberty, which I may be called upon more particu- 
 larly to define: I cannot,, however, perceive the 
 necessity of such definition. The latitude of scep- 
 tical liberty, in my humble view, may be very 
 extended without the slightest danger : and it should 
 not be forgotten, that the unbeliever cannot but
 
 view the pretensions of our Saviour as the most 
 arrant imposture: indeed this is the alternative 
 we urge him to. If he uses reviling instead of 
 argument, it appears to me he is the less dan- 
 gerous. 
 
 Dr. Lardner, the great champion of Christianity, 
 in some letters which passed between himself and 
 several of the Bishops on the prosecution of 
 Woolston, remarks, that the proper punishment of 
 a low and scurrilous style of writing is neglect, con- 
 tempt, scorn, and general indignation. I have my- 
 self heard from a modern pulpit the same dignified 
 opinion : " Let these base slanderers alone. The 
 exalted and glorious character of our great Master 
 and Lord, so artlessly, so beautifully delineated by 
 the sacred historians, can suffer nothing from the 
 rude and coarse attacks of vulgar and unprincipled 
 scribblers. Polished and well educated unbelievers 
 have uniformly borne testimony to its superior 
 excellence. And with regard to the rest, it is 
 better to leave them alone to perish in their 
 own native slime and filth, than by making them 
 the objects of legal animadversion to raise them 
 to distinction, and to give a momentary currency 
 to their infamous scurrility. Our Lord himself 
 never condescended to defend his own character; 
 but confidently appealed to the whole tenour of his 
 conduct, and boldly challenges his most malignant 
 enemies. * Which of you convince* me of sin ?'
 
 143 
 
 He has left an example. Let his disciples follow 
 his steps. The rays of the sun cannot be polluted 
 by the filthiest ordure." 
 
 Bishop Lowth, in his celebrated Visitation Sermon, 
 has the following splendid passage on this subject: 
 " Christianity itself was published to the world in 
 the most enlightened age ; it invited and challenged 
 the examination of the ablest judges, and stood the 
 test of the severest scrutiny : the more it is brought 
 to the light, to the greater advantage will it appear. 
 When, on the other hand, the dark ages of barba- 
 rism came on, as every art and science was almost 
 extinguished, so was Christianity in proportion 
 oppressed and overwhelmed by error and supersti- 
 tion : and they that pretended to defend it from the 
 assaults of its enemies, by prohibiting examination 
 and free inquiry, took the surest method of cutting 
 off all hopes of its recovery. Again, when letters 
 revived, and reason regained her liberty ; when a 
 spirit of inquiry began to prevail, and was kept up 
 and promoted by a happy invention, by which the 
 communication of knowledge was wonderfully faci- 
 litated ; Christianity immediately emerged out of 
 darkness, and was in a manner republished to the 
 world in its native simplicity. It hath always 
 flourished or decayed together with learning and 
 liberty : it will ever stand or fall with them. It is, 
 therefore, of the utmost importance to the cause of 
 true religion, that it be submitted to an open and 
 impartial examination ; that every disquisition con-
 
 144 
 
 cerning it be allowed its free course ; that even the 
 malice of its enemies should have its full scope, and 
 try its utmost strength of argument against it. Let 
 no man be alarmed at the attempts of Atheists or 
 Infidels : let them produce their cause : let them 
 bring forth their strong reasons, to their own con- 
 fusion : afford them not the advantage of restraint 
 the only advantage which their cause admits off: 
 let them not boast the false credit of supposed 
 arguments and pretended demonstrations which 
 they are forced to suppress. What has been the 
 consequence of all that licentious contradiction with 
 which the Gospel hath been received in these our 
 times and in this nation ? Hath it not given birth 
 to such irrefragable apologies and convincing illus- 
 trations of our most holy religion, as no other age 
 or nation ever produced ? What in particular hath 
 been the effect of unrestrained opposition in a very 
 recent instance, prepared with much labour and 
 study, and supported with all the art and eloquence 
 of a late celebrated genius? Hath not the very 
 weakness and impotence of the assault given the most 
 signal and decisive victory to the cause of truth ? 
 And do not the arms of this mighty champion* of 
 infidelity stand as a trophy erected by himself to 
 display and to perpetuate the triumph ?" 
 
 Dr. Campbell, in his admirable refutation of 
 Hume, every where inculcates the same noble 
 opinion; but one passage, although so well known 
 
 * Lord Bolingbroke.
 
 145 
 
 for its nervous eloquence, I cannot refrain from 
 quoting: "So far, therefore, am I from being 
 afraid of exposing Christianity by submitting it to 
 the test of reason ; so far am I from judging this a 
 trial which it is by no means fitted to endure, that 
 I think, on the contrary, the most violent attacks 
 that have been made upon the faith of Jesus, have 
 been of service to it. Yes : I do not hesitate to 
 affirm that our religion hath been indebted to the 
 attempts, though not to the intentions of its 
 bitterest enemies. They have tried its strength 
 indeed, and by trying they have displayed its 
 strength ; and that in so clear a light, as we could 
 never have hoped, without such a trial to have 
 viewed it in. Let them therefore write, let them 
 argue, and when arguments fail, even let them cavil 
 against religion as much as they please : I should 
 be heartily sorry, that ever in this island, the asylum 
 of liberty, where the spirit of Christianity is better 
 understood (however defective the inhabitants are in 
 observance of its precepts) than in any other part of 
 the Christian world ; I should, I say, be sorry that 
 in this island, so great a disservice were done to 
 religion, as to check its adversaries in any other way 
 than by returning a candid answer to their objec- 
 tions. I must at the same time acknowledge, that 
 I am both ashamed and grieved, when I observe 
 any friends of religion betray so great a diffidence 
 in the goodness of their cause, (for to this diffidence 
 
 L
 
 it can only be imputed,) as to show an inclination 
 for recurring to more forcible methods. The assaults 
 of infidels, I may venture to prophesy, will never 
 overturn our religion. They will prove not more 
 hurtful to the Christian system, if it is allowed to 
 compare small things with greatest, than the 
 boisterous winds are said to prove to the sturdy 
 oak. They shake it impetuously for a time, and 
 loudly threaten its subversion ; whilst, in effect, they 
 only serve to make it strike its roots the deeper, 
 and stand the firmer ever after." 3d edition, 
 p. 233. 
 
 The late Bishop Watson writes : " God forbid 
 that the search after truth should be discouraged 
 for fear of its consequences. The consequences 
 of truth may be subversive of systems of super- 
 stition, but they never can be injuripus to the 
 rights or well-founded expectations of the human 
 race." 
 
 He declares to Mr. Gibbon : " It would give 
 me much uneasiness to be reputed as an enemy 
 to free inquiry into religious matters, or as capable 
 of being animated into any degree of personal 
 malevolence against those who differ from me in 
 opinion. On the contrary, I look upon the right 
 of private judgment, in every concern respecting 
 God and ourselves, as superior to the confront 
 of human authority ; and have ever regarded free 
 disquisition as the best means of illustrating the
 
 147 
 
 doctrine, and establishing the truth, of Christianity. 
 Let the followers of Mahomet, and the zealots of 
 the Church of Rome, support their several religious 
 systems by damping every effort of the human 
 intellect to pry into the foundations of their faith ; 
 but never can it become a Christian to be afraid of 
 being asked a reason of the faith that is in him ; 
 nor a protestant to be studious of enveloping his 
 religion in mystery and ignorance." 
 
 To Mr. Paine, in his Apology for the Bible, he 
 makes this honest and manly confession: "If 
 you have made the best examination you can, and 
 yet reject revealed religion as an imposture, I pray 
 God may pardon what I esteem your error. And 
 whether you have made this examination or not, 
 does not become me, or any man, to determine." 
 
 I might' endlessly multiply these authorities ; but 
 though I might add to their number, I could not 
 add to their weight. I have omitted altogether 
 many admirable arguments by the protestant dis- 
 senters, because they are somewhat interested 
 parties, and I was resolved to abide by the esta- 
 blished church. One sentence only I shall extract 
 from a private letter of Dr. Lardner to Dr. Wad- 
 dington, bishop of Chichester: " Your lordship 
 freely declares, that Mr. "Woolston ought not to be 
 punished for being an infidel, nor for 'writing at 
 all against the Christian religion, which appears 
 to be a noble declaration. If the governors of
 
 148 
 
 the church and civil magistrates had all along 
 acted up to this principle, I think the Christian 
 religion had been before now well nigh universal." 
 
 There remains one other argument, from which 
 
 ~ 
 
 it seems impossible to escape. Bishop Berkeley, 
 Dr. Benson, and many of the ablest advocates of 
 Christianity, have written dialogues, in which they 
 introduce an unbeliever with every possible ob- 
 jection (as they say) k is possible to invent. Now, 
 why not permit the sceptic to do this for himself? 
 Indeed, it appears the only mode of remedying 
 what divines pretend is the greatest loss ever sus- 
 tained by Christianity, viz. the destruction of the 
 books of the early opponents of revelation. Berke- 
 ley, Paley, Lardner, and all our first biblical writers, 
 express their regret for this loss. 
 
 Bishop Loyd says : " Though some of our 
 Deists complain of the loss of Porphyry's books 
 against the Christian religion, yet they may be 
 assured, for their comfort, they will not want the 
 help of our learned men to bring them to light. 
 We want them, indeed, on many accounts ; but 
 especially to shew them, that, as they have Por- 
 phyry's malice, so, if they had his great learning 
 too, both these joined together would not hurt 
 the Christian religion. As for his arguments, it 
 cannot be imagined that there was any thing of 
 strength in them, more than what Julian the Apos- 
 tate took into the work that he writ afterwards on
 
 that subject. And to our comfort, as well as the 
 Deists', that work is not lost." LOYD'S Chron. 
 Account of Pythagoras, 8$c. p. 21. 
 
 Y 
 
 Grotius, in a letter to Peireski, savs : "I send 
 
 * / 
 
 you, most noble sir, some passages taken out of 
 the writings of Porphyry by the defenders of the 
 Christian religion, from whence you may easily see 
 how many things might have been produced out of 
 his books for the purpose of Christianity, if we had 
 them entire ; those books especially which he wrote 
 against the Christians, wherein he put many weapons 
 into our hands that might be employed against 
 himself and the Pagans. As to the poison con- 
 tained in those books, sufficient antidotes were to 
 be had out of many apologetic writings of the 
 ancient Christians, and especially out of the books 
 of Origen against Celsus, and of Cyril against 
 Julian. Wherefore I should esteem it a public 
 benefit to have those books in the hands of such 
 men who are willing and able to use them." 
 GROT 1 1 Epist. p. 197. ep. 509. 
 
 " It were much to be desired that we had the 
 books which Porphyry wrote against the Christian 
 religion." Scaligerana Art. Porphyrius. 
 
 Le Clerc says, that "the thirty books of Eusebius 
 against Porphyry are the greatest loss that could 
 be in respect to the works of Eusebius ; for by 
 them we might have learnt the objections of the 
 ablest philosopher of his time against the Christian
 
 150 
 
 religion, and the answer of the most learned bishop 
 of his age." LE CLERC, Bib. Univ. torn. x. 
 p. 494. 
 
 Even modern infidelity is allowed to have its 
 accompanying good. " We must not, however, 
 forget, that unbelievers of every class have their 
 place in the great system as well as the apostles, 
 though we may be thankful that we are not of 
 the number. Of plants and animals, there are 
 
 r ^ 
 
 the seemingly mean and noxious, as well as the 
 more noble and useful. A philosopher will not 
 hate or despise any thing, but study the nature and 
 the uses of every thing, and endeavour to derive 
 advantage from every thing ; believing that nothing 
 was made in vain, and that a wise and benevolent 
 Providence directs and overrules all events." Ob- 
 servations on the Increase of Infidelity. Phila- 
 delphia, 1797. 
 
 I recollect to have met, in some living writer, 
 with an observation, that " the writings of the 
 infidel will not unfrequently be found to do more 
 service than injury to the Christian cause. The 
 frequent assault of the citadel keeps the garrison 
 awake. The attacks of the infidel call forth the 
 energies of the faithful : they excite arguments to 
 strengthen the weak, or to confirm the wavering, 
 which might otherwise never have appeared." 
 
 The deplorable scepticism increasing on the 
 Continent, and more especially in the popish
 
 151 
 
 countries, is universally acknowledged. I believe 
 the absence of religious liberty to be the great 
 and only cause. Whiston mentions an almost 
 prophetic anticipation of it by Newton : " Sir 
 Isaac Newton had a very sagacious conjecture, 
 which he told Dr. Clarke, from whom I received 
 it, that the overbearing tyranny and persecuting 
 power of the antichristian party, which had so 
 long corrupted Christianity and enslaved the Chris- 
 tian world, must be put a stop to, and broken 
 to pieces by the prevalence of infidelity, for some 
 time before primitive Christianity could be restored ; 
 which seems to be the very means that is now 
 working in Europe for the same good and great 
 end of Providence. Possibly he might think no 
 other way so likely to do it in human affairs ; 
 it being, I acknowledge, too sadly evident, that 
 there is not at present religion enough in Christen-' 
 dom to put a stop to such antichristian tyranny 
 and persecution, upon any genuine principle of 
 Christianity." 
 
 I think .1 have now proved the right of the 
 unbeliever to the freedom of the Press, and the 
 entire accordance of that right with the interests of 
 Christianity : I have shown this from the writings of 
 Christians themselves, without the aid of one solitary 
 argument from sceptics. I must again remind the 
 reader, that I am far from denying the existence of 
 evils in that liberty : my argument is, that the good
 
 152 
 
 overbalances the evil. I contend that Christianity 
 has suffered far more from the cruel persecution 
 originating in the supposed right of the State to 
 interfere with " heresies and blasphemies," and that 
 no human' tribunal can be equal to the legisla- 
 tion of what is the subject of Divine judgments. 
 Mahometanism, the doctrines of Confucius, the 
 wooden idols of Hindostan, are the " law of the 
 land" in their respective countries; and on what 
 principle can we send out missionaries to convert 
 these deluded victims of priestcraft to overturn 
 state religions founded on our principles? Dr. 
 Furneaux observes, (Letters, &c. p. 73, note,) " that 
 laws for the punishment of blasphemy may be 
 easily turned to the destruction of all religious 
 liberty : for what is blasphemy, in the general sense 
 of the term, but uttering something dishonourable 
 or injurious to the Divine Being ? And what con- 
 troverted religious sentiment is there, which under 
 this general notion, by a court and jury of bigots, 
 may not be condemned as blasphemy? The 
 Athanasian styles the Arian a blasphemer, the Arian 
 the Athanasian, the 'Galvinist the Arminian, the 
 Arminian the Calvinist ; and thus the same laws, 
 differently applied as different parties prevail, will 
 prove fatal to the religious liberty of all of them in 
 their turn." 
 
 This necessary toleration of evil for the sake of 
 good, particularly as relates to scepticism, was never
 
 153 
 
 better stated than by Milton : " Good and evil, we 
 know, in the field of this world grow up together 
 almost inseparably : and the knowledge of good is 
 so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of 
 evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly 
 to be discerned, that those confused seeds which 
 were imposed on Psyche as an incessant labour to 
 cull out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. 
 As therefore the state of man now is ; what wisdom 
 can there be to choose, what continence to forbear, 
 without the knowledge of evil ? He that can 
 apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and 
 seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet dis- 
 tinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, 
 he is the true wayfaring Christian. I cannot 
 praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised 
 and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her 
 adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that 
 immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust 
 and heat." 
 
 It is scarcely credible how any Christian, 
 bearing in mind the spirit which elevated our 
 blessed Saviour on the cross amidst the scoffs and 
 reviling of the Scribes and Pharisees, can be the 
 advocate of religious persecution. The same 
 barbarian bigotry inflicted the stripes and imprison- 
 ment on Paul and Peter, and sacrificed so many 
 victims on the smoking altar of persecution. This 
 same principle would tend to pound up and per-
 
 154 
 
 petuate every enormity and every error which 
 could plead the sanction of age. The occa- 
 sional mistakes of persecutors have been acknow- 
 ledged by themselves, and inquisitors have pleaded 
 the ample remuneration for the loss of life in 
 the posthumous fame of martyrdom ; but I think 
 it fair the martyr should have the refusal of his 
 living reputation ; and might ask the question, with 
 Sir Richard Steele, in the Christian Hero, " What 
 was it to Cassar to be voted a god in the place where 
 he ceased to be a man ?" 
 
 Sir, I plead for that Christian liberty wherewith 
 Christ hath made us free. It was on that rock of 
 liberty that the ark of the reformation, tossed on the 
 foaming billows of persecution, at last rested in 
 glorious triumph : it is from that rock of liberty that 
 the banners of Christianity will wave over the whole 
 world. You may say that all mankind are not 
 philosophers : I think I have shown that the Com- 
 mon People were the earliest and latest friends of 
 revelation. You cannot doubt the prescience of 
 the Almighty ; and seeing that he made no provi- 
 sion for the civil punishment of " blasphemy," you 
 cannot doubt his intention of reserving it for his 
 own cognizance. " Gather not up the tares, there- 
 fore, lest ye root up also the wheat with them : let 
 them both grow together till the harvest." In the 
 language of the Roman historian, " Deorum injuriae 
 Diis curai" " leave to the Gods the revenge of their
 
 155 
 
 own wrongs. 1 ' It was the saying of a sound and 
 orthodox bishop of the English Church " Fire and 
 faggot may consume, but cannot refute ; may make 
 men coals and cinders, but cannot make them 
 Christians; imprisonment and fetters may give 
 them secular punishment, but not Christian contri- 
 tion." The paper bullets of " blasphemy" can never, 
 Mr. Wilberforce, destroy revelation : and I might 
 apply to revelation that poetical simile on the abuse 
 and persecution of an expatriated Englishman 
 Truth will ever rise superior to falsehood. The 
 vapours which gather round the rising sun, and 
 follow it in its course, seldom s fail at the close of it 
 to form a magnificent theatre for its reception, and 
 to invest with variegated tints and with a softened 
 effulgence the luminary which they cannot hide. 
 
 Thus, Sir, I have advocated, from reason, from 
 the example and precepts of Christ, and from the 
 authority of his most true and zealous followers, the 
 most unrestricted Liberty of the Press : and I -trust 
 that if the State should think it necessary again to 
 prosecute the wretched venders of irreligion, the 
 prosecution will be carried on not in the name of 
 his Most Sacred Majesty, the Defender of the Faith; 
 but from the /Far-Office of his Royal Highness the 
 Duke of York, Commander-in-Chief, Bishop of 
 Osnaburg ! 
 
 Believe me, Sir, I have addressed these Letters 
 to you in the truest spirit of independence and
 
 156 
 
 charity. 1 arn not, Sir, the standard-bearer of this 
 or that political Party ; although I recognize the 
 value and necessity of the association of bodies of 
 men pursuing the same end in furtherance qf their 
 common cause ; and detest a senseless outcry 
 against party, and its accompanying vilification of 
 every public character who varies from our own 
 individual standard of right, or who is charged with 
 the most corrupt motives for one act of incon- 
 sistency. I view the association of religious and 
 political bodies of men as the principle of gravita- 
 tion in human society the atmosphere in which 
 the planet of human nature revolves. But, at the 
 same time, I abhor that satellite system which can 
 separate on no occasion from the main body, but 
 holds it necessary to go " through thick and thin," 
 and takes for its model of perfection the vane of a 
 weathercock, in its perpetual subserviency to the 
 wind that blows. 
 
 I address you, Sir, and the Religious Public, 
 neither as a Tory, a Whig, nor yet as a Radical ; 
 esteeming these nicknames as bigoted, and incapable 
 of definition, and as particoloured insignia of pre- 
 judice and violence. I cannot help seeing that 
 " party is the madness of many for the gain of a 
 few;" and when I reflect on the occurrences in 
 rny own times, and the lessons of history, I can 
 discover little difference in the measures of the 
 different parties, however various the men : the
 
 157 
 
 engine continues the same, though the proprietors 
 may occasionally vary. It is well remarked by 
 Ralph, in his History of Parliaments, that " our 
 contending political parties are the two thieves 
 between whom the nation is crucified." I am not, 
 however, the apologist of that political pie-ball, the 
 " genus incognitum" of naturalists, who, a single 
 man with a double face, changes his opinions with 
 the same facility he does his clothes whose eyes 
 are ever turned from the setting to the rising sun 
 and who, to worm himself into the favour of all 
 parties, belongs to none, libels the one to the other, 
 and agrees with the last he was in company with. 
 No, Sir; rather than this non-descript, give me your 
 apostate Lawyer, your " Renegado" and licensed 
 manufacturer of Court-plaister, or even Non mi 
 ricordo himself. It was a law of the Athenian 
 Legislator, that the neutral citizen, when parties ran 
 high in the republic, should suffer capital punish- 
 ment ; and I cannot but think it a more justifiable 
 application of punishment, than ninety-nine of 
 the hundred cases in the criminal code of England. 
 There is no pretender to character and influence so 
 purely contemptible; and I think you could guess, 
 Sir, the name of a London Alderman of quicksilver 
 notoriety, to whom I might apply the letter of 
 Bishop Hall to Laud : " Would I knew where 
 to find you. To-day you are in the tents of the
 
 158 
 
 Romanists, to-morrow in ours, and the next day 
 between both. Our adversaries think you ours ; we 
 theirs : your conscience finds you with both, and 
 neither. How long will you halt in this indifferency? 
 Resolve one way and loathing this bat-like nature, 
 be either a bird or a beast*." 
 
 Sir, I despise these party distinctions ; and when 
 I read the classics of my native tongue the works 
 of the most brilliant fixed stars of the political system 
 those offerings placed on the altar of liberty I see 
 the glory divided amongst all parties. I see local 
 and party prejudices, self-interest and passion, burst 
 through by the human understanding, " like mists 
 that melt before the morning's sun !" I see MILTON, 
 the staunch and radical Republican, delivering him- 
 self of that magnificent and sublime production, the 
 
 * In a volume of Trenchard's posthumous essays is an admirable 
 essay on "practicable men." He says : " Most men are governed by 
 ambition, vanity, avarice, or some other appetite; and therefore 
 money, title, pleasure, and power, will render them practicable to the 
 terms upon which they are to be had, let the terms be what they will. 
 No money, no Swiss, but any Swiss for money. He must sign a blank 
 to espouse no opinion ; but be ready to entertain all, and to oppose 
 all. He is to practise contradictions, and to find reasons for them, 
 and against them, at the word of command : he must therefore 
 defend or oppose the same thing, be it good or bad, if there be 
 occasion, as there often is. Turnspits and mill-horses are very 
 practicable creatures. By the same means that men become prac- 
 ticable to those whom they hate, boroughs become practicable to 
 such as they never saw. The city banker had nothing to do, but to 
 knock upon the bottom of his hog trough, (his pocket,) and presently 
 a whole corporation grew practicable to the sound."
 
 " Speech for the Liberty of the Press" JEREMY 
 TAYLOR, the Tory dignitary of the Church, who 
 followed the broken fortunes of an unfortunate 
 Monarch, asserting the liberties of his countrymen 
 in that almost inspired strain of poetry and 
 patriotism the " Liberty of Prophesying" a mine 
 of moral and political truth, whence JOHN LOCKE, 
 the constitutional Whig of his day, afterwards drew 
 his immortal works on Government and Toleration. 
 Ye narrow-minded bigots of prejudice and ignorance, 
 be not the dupes and instruments of party with such 
 mirrors before you ! 
 
 And, oh ! my countrymen, if there are any among 
 you whose eyes should glance over these pages, 
 unbelievers in Revelation, and yet friends of liberty 
 who, faithless to your own powers of mind, will 
 not employ them in fairly weighing the evidences of 
 Christianity who know so little of its grand and 
 magnificent scheme for human nature as to think 
 that the Temple of Freedom is only to be built with 
 the ruins of the Christian Church pause a moment, 
 and read the history of JESUS CHRIST. Read the 
 history of the British Constitution and the biogra- 
 phies of Sir Thomas More, of Hampden, of 
 Sydney, of Locke, and Lord William Russel, who 
 all of them bled and suffered in the cause of the 
 People, and who braved the peril and the insult 
 of sinking the foundation stones of the British 
 Constitution, urged by the dictates of Christian
 
 1GO 
 
 principles, and supported by their sublime and in- 
 spiring promises 
 
 " For Luther's light has too much wann'd mankind, 
 For Hampden's truths to linger long behind." 
 
 '"-""j vfr'^-i' '-*> ' r':-^-. '?'.:*<<;? ^T'hi'i--..: r^'j ni 
 
 j t.ry 
 Do not, Sir, suspect me to be the advocate or 
 
 the cat's paw of the episcopalian or the sectary. For 
 my own part, Sir, I have rarely known polemical 
 disputation produce conviction, scarcely one whose 
 faith has become the trophy of doctrinal debate : I 
 shall not cast my net in troubled waters, nor inter- 
 fere in bold disputes, which seem neither leaving 
 secret things to the Lord our God, nor the revealed 
 ones to us and our children. " Certainly," says 
 Bishop Fell, " the first propagators of our faith 
 proceeded at another rate ; they well knew, that not 
 the brain but the heart was the proper soil of that 
 celestial plant, and therefore did not amuse their 
 proselytes with curious questions, but set them to the 
 active part of their religion." I have long since 
 been wearied of the trackless desert of human 
 opinions, and deplore that unaccountable folly of 
 disputatious and worldly-minded Christians, who 
 consider that disbelief of their appendages to the 
 Gospel renders our credence of the essential parts of 
 it totally useless. I think it fair to conclude, that the 
 belief of no doctrine can be necessary to salvation 
 which is not plainly declared so, and at the same 
 time so fully explained and defined, that every one
 
 161 
 
 who reads may understand. Surely doubtful 
 meanings cannot be revelation. Few men read the 
 Bible, whatever their speculative opinions may be, 
 and yet remain ignorant of the essential doctrines of 
 the Gospel. " I confess at first it puzzled much 
 my inquiry to discover these mountains were made 
 so near neighbours to the divided clouds." I 
 heartily hope that the time is not far distant, when 
 Christians will lay aside these human liveries, and 
 once more be united under that universal and all 
 comprehensive designation given to the Christians at 
 Antioch. I wish that we* could busy ourselves less 
 with the failings of our neighbours, so as to gain 
 more leisure for the detection of our own. " I pity 
 such as love to live like pew-keepers in the house 
 of God, busy in seating others, without ever 
 providing a room for themselves*." To prevent the 
 
 Jeremy Taylor, in the preface to the Liberty of Prophesying, 
 most happily defines his object: " The intendinent of my discourse 
 is, that permissions should be, in questions speculative, indetermin- 
 able, curious, and unnecessary ; and that men would not make more 
 necessities then God made, which indeed are not many. The fault I 
 find and seek to remedy is, that men are so dogmaticall and resolute 
 in their opinions, and impatient of others' disagreeings, in those things 
 wherein is no sufficient meanes of union and determination ; but that 
 men should let opinions and problemes keep their own forms, and not 
 be obtruded as axiomes, nor questions in the vast collection of the 
 systeme of divinity be adopted into the family of faith : and I think 
 I have reason to desire this." 
 
 With the same elevation of understanding writes that quaint old 
 author, Sir Thomas Brown, speaking of his early prejudices : " These 
 opinions I never maintained with pertinacity, or endeavoured to 
 inveagle any man's belief unto mine ; nor so much as ever revealed 
 
 M
 
 162 
 
 possibility of mistake, I shall further quote the 
 dedication of an eloquent and incomparable sermon 
 by Cud worth*. 
 
 " The scope of this is not to contend for this or 
 that opinion, but onely to perswade men to the Life 
 of Christ^ as the pith and kernel of all religion. 
 Without which, I may boldly say, all the severall 
 forms of religion in the world, though we please 
 ourselves never so much in them, are but so many 
 severall dreams: and those many opinions about 
 religion that are every where so eagerly contended 
 for on all sides, where this does not lie at the bot- 
 tome, are but so many shadows fighting with one 
 another : wherefore I could not think any thing else, 
 either more necessary for Christians in generall, or 
 more seasonable at this time, then to stirre them up 
 to the reall establishment of the righteousnesse of 
 God in their hearts, and that participation of the 
 Divine nature, which the apostle speaketh of. Tnat 
 so they might not content themselves with mere 
 phancies and conceits of Christ, without the Spirit 
 of Christ really dwelling in them, and Christ him- 
 self inwardly formed in their hearts: nor satisfie 
 themselves with the mere holding of right and 
 
 or disputed them with my dearest friends ; by which means I neither 
 propagated them in others, ner confirmed them in myself; but suffer- 
 ing them to flame upon their own substance, without addition of new 
 fuel, they went out insensibly of themselves." Religio Medici. 
 
 * Preached before the House of Commons, 1647, from 1 John, 
 ii. 3, 4. See CUDWORTH'S Intellectual System, vol. ii. 4to. edit.
 
 orthodox opinions, as they conceive ; whilest they are 
 utterly devoid within of that divine life which 
 Christ came to kindle in men's souls ; and, there- 
 fore, are so apt to spend all their zeal upon a vio- 
 lent obtruding of their own opinions and appre- 
 hensions upon others, which cannot give entertain- 
 ment to them ; which, besides its repugnancy to the 
 doctrine and example of Christ himself, is like to 
 be the bellows that will blow a perpetual fire of 
 discord and contention in Christ's commonwealths : 
 whilest in the mean time, these hungry and starved 
 opinions devoure all the life and substance of reli- 
 gion, as the lean kine, in Pharaoh's dream, did eat 
 up the fat!" 
 
 Again, Sir, I call upon you, in the name of 
 Christianity, to oppose with all your heart the 
 MINISTRY of the present day: their DISMISSAL is 
 the interest of religion, and the prayer of nine-tenths 
 of the country : a Ministry concocted of purblind 
 Tories, apostate Whigs, and burnt out Jacobins ; a 
 mere knot of expedient-mongers, who have origi- 
 nated not one solitary instance of comprehensive 
 policy; whose impotency of judgment is only 
 equalled by impotency of execution ; who contain 
 neither the rank, the wealth, nor the talent of their 
 country ; but who, with an unexampled and auda- 
 cious defiance of public opinion, cleave -to their 
 places as " dogs stick to a kitchen ;" and whose sole 
 support is the countenance of rats, informers, and
 
 164 
 
 alarmists. I have not disgraced any party by 
 giving these men any canonical description, of 
 Tory, Whig, or Radical ; holding them to be a 
 nauseous compound of the worst qualities of all. 
 
 If such a Ministry can maintain itself, it can only 
 be by " curbing the Seditious Press ;" and the ne- 
 cessity of this has accordingly been long the burden 
 of their song, supported by a chorus of hole and 
 corner addressers. 
 
 I trust, Sir, that if any invasion of the FREEDOM 
 of the PRESS is attempted, either in this or any 
 succeeding Session, you will stand forward, and 
 place the protecting shield of your eloquence and 
 exertion over this telegraph of knowledge this in- 
 vincible missionary of Christianity this conservator 
 of the liberties of Christendom ! Address to our 
 " Representatives" the nervous language of our im- 
 mortal poet: " What should ye do then? should 
 ye suppress all this flowry crop of knowledge and 
 new light sprung up, and yet springing daily in the 
 city? Should ye set an oligarchy of twenty in- 
 grossers over it, to bring a famine upon our minds 
 again, when ye shall know nothing but what is mea- 
 sured to us by their bushel ? Believe it, Lords and 
 Commons, they who counsel ye to such a sup- 
 pressing, do as good as bid ye suppress yourselves." 
 
 Here, Sir, I must take my leave : you have been 
 described by a late celebrated female historian, the 
 most popular man in England. I have pointed out
 
 165 
 
 to you the only mode in which you can maintain 
 that character : I have concluded an expos of 
 " Sedition and Blasphemy :" I have, I trust, in 
 some degree at least, vindicated the People. But 
 had blasphemy and sedition really existed among 
 them, I should have counselled you to be yet more 
 jealous of the FREEDOM of the PRESS. I should 
 have called to your mind the character given of 
 Mr. Fox, by the same female eulogist; of that true 
 constancy of integrity and intellect, which " main- 
 tained principles in spite of circumstances, and 
 knew how to preserve the household gods of 
 the friends of freedom in the midst of the con- 
 flagration !" 
 
 I have now, Sir, accomplished a solemn duty. 
 I have written with the intent, and, I trust, in the 
 spirit of Christianity. I would not wish a name to 
 add to or detract from the authority of these Let- 
 ters: follow the light they yield, without heeding 
 the hand that holds it. That they may accom- 
 plish the intention of their author, is his most ardent 
 hope and hasten that promised time, when "HE 
 shall judge among the nations ; and shall WORK 
 CONVICTION in many peoples*" 
 
 I am, Sir, 
 
 With the highest respect, 
 Your obedient Servant and Fellow-Christian, 
 
 CHRISTOPHILUS. 
 
 * Bishop Lowth's Translation of Isaiah, ii. 4.
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 " IT is the greatest impiety to deprive mankind of 
 liberty in matters of religion, or to hinder them from 
 chusing what Divinity they may chuse to worship; 
 neither man, or God, is desirous of forced service." 
 TERTULLIAN'S Apologet. chap. 14. 
 
 "If we were to use violence in defending the faith, 
 the Bishops would oppose it.'* ST. HILARY, b. 1. 
 
 " Religion by compulsion is no longer religion ; it 
 must be by persuasion, and not by constraint. Religion 
 is under no controul,and cannot by power be directed." 
 LACTANTIUS, b. 3. 
 
 " It is a most execrable heresy and crime, to want tq 
 drag by force, by blows, by imprisonment, &c. those 
 whom we have not been able to convince by reason." 
 ST. ATHANASIUS, b. 1. 
 
 " Nothing is more contrary to religion than con- 
 straint." JUSTIN MARTYR, b. 5. 
 
 "Shall we persecute those whom God suffers and 
 tolerates?" ST. AUGUSTINE. 
 
 " Use not the least violence against the Jews." 
 Fourth Council of Toledo, 56th Canon. 
 
 " Advise, but force not." Letters of ST. BERNARD. 
 
 " We do not pretend to destroy error by force and 
 violence." Discourse of the Clergy of France to Louis 
 the Thirteenth. 
 
 " We have always disapproved of rigorous mea- 
 sures." Assembly of the Clergy, August 11, 1560,
 
 167 
 
 " Of the same consideration is mending of authors, 
 not to their own mind but ours, that is, to mend them 
 so as to spoil them ; forbidding the publication of books, 
 in which there is nothing impious, or against the public 
 interest, leaving out clauses in translations, disgracing 
 men's persons, charging disavowed doctrines upon men, 
 and the persons of the men with the consequents of their 
 doctrine, which they deny either to be true or to be 
 consequent, false reporting of disputations and con- 
 ferences, burning books by the hand of the hangman, 
 and all such acts, which shew that we either distrust 
 God for the maintenance of his truth, or that we distrust 
 the cause, or distrust ourselves and our abilities." 
 Liberty of Prophesying, Preface, p. 35. 
 
 "If you have been so beloved of Heaven, as to be 
 shown the truth, it has done you a most special favour ; 
 but does it become those who have the inheritance of 
 their father, to hate those who are not so blessed ?" 
 Spirit of Laws, b. 25. 
 
 "It is with religion as it is \vith love; commands are 
 nothing, constraint still less ; nothing is more independent 
 than love and belief." AMELOT de la Houssaite on the 
 Letters of Cardinal d'Ossat. 
 
 " It is a most barbarous zeal to pretend to plant 
 religion in the heart, as if persuasion could be the 
 effect of constraint." BOULAINVILLIEK'S State of 
 France. 
 
 " Experience teaches us, that violence is more likely 
 to irritate than to heal those evils, which have taken 
 root in the mind," 8cc. DE THOU, Epist. dedicated 
 to Henry IV. 
 
 " Violence always makes hypocrites ; you cannot
 
 168 
 
 persuade, when you proclaim on all sides nothing but 
 menaces." TILLEMONT'S Ecclesiastical History, vol. 6. 
 
 " It appears to be conformable to justice, truth, and 
 right reason, to walk in the track of the ancient church, 
 which never made use of violence to extend and esta- 
 blish its religion." Remonstrance of the Parliament of 
 Paris to Henry II. 
 
 " The exacting by force t any religion, is an evident 
 proof, that the spirit which directs it is a spirit inimical 
 to truth." DIROIS, Doctor of the Sorbonne, b. vi. c. 4. 
 
 " We know that faith comes by persuasion, and is 
 not to be controuled." FLECHIER, Bishop of Nismes t 
 lett. 19. 
 
 ' " Remember that the disorders of the soul are not to 
 be cured by force and violence." Cardinal de CAMUS, 
 Pastoral Instruct. 1088. 
 
 " No ; they must be met by a reason, instructed in the 
 knowledge of things, and fought in their own quarters, 
 and their arms must be turned upon themselves; this 
 may be done, and the advantage is all ours. We have 
 steel and brass for our defence, and they have little else 
 than twigs and bull-rushes for the assault ; we have 
 light, and firm ground, and they are lost in smoke and 
 mists ; they tread upon bogs and dangerous fens, and 
 reel near the rocks and steeps. And shall we despise 
 our advantages, and forsake them ? Shall we relinquish 
 our ground, and our light, and muffle ourselves up in 
 darkness ? Shall we give our enemies the weapons, and 
 all the odds, and so endeavour to insure their triumph 
 over us ? This is sottishly to betray religion and our- 
 selves." Essays by GLANVILLE, Chaplain of King 
 Charles //., on Usefulness of Real Philosophy to Re- 
 ligion, p. 42.
 
 169 
 
 " It truly ought, provided it does not trouble the 
 peace and order of the state ; for it does not depend 
 on man to believe, or not to believe ; but it depends on 
 him to treat with respect the usages and customs of 
 this country : and if you say it is a crime not to believe 
 the established religion, you yourselves accuse the first 
 Christians, your fathers, and you would justify those 
 whom you accuse of crime, in having delivered them 
 to the executioners." LOCKE on Toleration. 
 
 " To put men in prison merely on account of their 
 religious belief or persuasion, is a great oppression, 
 and, properly speaking, false imprisonment: to fine 
 them, or take away their estates for that cause, is 
 robbery : to put them to death for not acting against 
 their consciences, is murder. Can any thing be more 
 wicked ? It is not, then, difficult to determine whether 
 the folly and absurdity, or tyranny and wickedness, of 
 persecution on account of religion, are greater." 
 GROTIUS, Epistolarum Amicorum. 
 
 " If some men think others are mistaken or erroneous 
 in matters of religion, it is a kind and charitable part, 
 to endeavour, by counsel, argument, and persuasion, to 
 set them right ; but all attempts to force them are 
 absurd, because impossible tyrannical, because unjust." 
 TOPLADY. 
 
 " Now are we to think, that these gentle means of 
 propagating Christianity were proper only for the time 
 of its first appearance, when the church was destitute 
 of the civil power ; and, by reason of its opposition to 
 the prevailing religions of the world, drew upon itself 
 the anger and fury of the princes of it ; but that the 
 case is now altered, since the kings and rulers, upon 
 their conversion to the faith, are obliged to subject
 
 170 
 
 their sceptres to Jesus Christ : for the change of fortune 
 makes no change in his religion ; nor can the alteration 
 of any worldly affairs take away the force and obliga- 
 tions of his commands; for Christ, hy his apostles, 
 preached one scheme of doctrines to last for ever. 
 'Tis true, that kings are to submit their sceptres to 
 Christ, not by forcing men with punishments, in oppo- 
 sition to his commands, to profess, contrary to their 
 conscience and real sentiments, what they believe to 
 be false, and so to fill his church with hypocrites 
 instead of true believers ; but by ordaining equal and 
 just laws, agreeable to the Gospel precepts, for the 
 preservation of the publick tranquillity ; and that there 
 may be nothing to obstruct the true spiritual worship 
 of God, and the salvation of souls. This is that most 
 harmless, and yet most powerful, method of propa- 
 gating the Gospel, agreeable to its nature and genius, 
 by which, in the beginning, it was spread in a short 
 time through the whole world, by a few weak and 
 defenceless persons, instructed only by the Divine 
 Spirit, through the weight of its arguments, and the 
 power of its miracles ; and by which it may be still 
 propagated and preserved pure and uncorrupt, against 
 all the attempts of unbelievers and hereticks. For our 
 Lord did not furnish his disciples with carnal weapons 
 to oppose the frauds, impostures, violence, and perse- 
 cutions of the world ; but with spiritual weapons, which, 
 through God, are powerful to bring every imagination 
 into captivity to the obedience of Christ, that they 
 might triumph over the world in the midst of afflictions, 
 by their innocence, simplicity, fortitude, and patience. 
 So far, indeed, was he from ordaining persecutions as 
 the punishment of error, that he commands his church,
 
 171 
 
 when suffering persecutions, to pray for those that 
 persecute it. By this means the church in the be- 
 ginning was founded, and so wonderfully propagated 
 throughout the whole world in its first and purest 
 ages." LIMBORCH'S History of the Inquisition, vol. i. 
 p. 3. 
 
 Lord Kames gives the following parable against 
 persecution, for which he acknowledges his obligations 
 to the ingenious Dr. Franklin : " And it came to pass 
 after these things, that Abraham sat in the door of his 
 tent, about the going down of the sun. And behold a 
 man bent with age, coming from the way of the wilder- 
 ness, leaning on a staff. And Abraham arose and met 
 him, and said unto him, Turn in, I pray thee, and wash 
 thy feet, and tarry all night ; and thou shall rise early 
 in th morning, and go on thy way. And the man said, 
 Nay ; for I will abide under this tree. But Abraham 
 pressed him greatly : so he turned and went into the 
 tent : and Abraham baked unleavened bread, and they 
 did eat. And when Abraham saw that the man blessed 
 not God, he said unto him, Wherefore dost thou not 
 worship the most high God, Creator of heaven and 
 earth ? And the man answered and said, I do not worship 
 thy God, neither do I call upon his name ; for I have 
 made to myself a god, which abide th always in mine 
 house, and provideth me with all things. And Abraham's 
 zeal was kindled against the man ; and he arose and 
 fell upon the man, and drove him forth with blows into 
 the wilderness. And God called unto Abraham, saying, 
 Abraham, where is the stranger ? And Abraham an- 
 swered, and said, Lord, he would not worship thee, 
 neither would he call upon thy name; therefore have I 
 driven him out from before my face into the wilderness.
 
 172 
 
 And God said, Have I borne with him these hundred 
 and ninety and eight years, and nourished him, and 
 clothed him, notwithstanding his rebellion against me; 
 and couldst not thou, who art thyself a sinner, bear 
 with him one night?" Sketches of the History of Man, 
 vol. iii. 435. 
 
 The following extracts are made from an old tract in 
 my possession, of sterling merit, but of the author of 
 which I know nothing, except from the title-page. 
 The reader will not, however, t am sure, regret the 
 time bestowed on such sound and unanswerable argu- 
 ment. The tract is entitled, " Liberty of Conscience 
 the Magistrate's Interest ; by a Protestant, a Lover of 
 Peace and the Prosperity of the Nation 1668 :" 
 
 " For the errors you may suppose men possessed 
 withal, as an eager persecution is apt to make the 
 professors of them think them more than ordinary 
 truths, and themselves some great men in maintaining 
 them ; so it makes others seek after that, when driven 
 into a corner, \vhich, were it in the open streets, no 
 man would regard. He that preaches and writes under 
 restraint, that restraint begets him readers and hearers, 
 that would else pass through the world with very little 
 notice taken of him ; things difficult, and hard to be 
 come by, carry some weight in men's expectancy: 
 foolish and absurd opinions are only put to nurse by 
 persecution, and by that made to have something in 
 the concerns and fears of others, which has indeed 
 nothing in itself. The hiding men by a keen pursuit 
 after them, in the profession of such things, keeps them 
 alive ; whereas if they were openly preached, written, 
 and discoursed of, the folly of them would appear such, 
 as not only others, but the men themselves, would be
 
 173 
 
 ashamed and aweary of them. Besides, punishing 
 men for religion, where there are several parties, laies 
 a foundation of endless troubles and perpetual feuds ; 
 for that ill opinion and anger, which makes one party, 
 when prevailing, to suppress and punish the rest, pro- 
 pagates still the same anger and dislike in the parties 
 punished, and begets, by such provocation, a certain 
 resolution to retort the same again, and a readiness 
 to embrace all opportunities to effect it ; whereas that 
 party that once gives liberty to the rest, buries all 
 those evils, and unites all in the common union of 
 their own interest and security. 'Twill be impossible 
 to find out a way for men of differing judgments in 
 religion to live together, and enjoy the common advan- 
 tages which, as men, they may afford one to another, 
 unless they exercise an indulgence lo each other, in 
 that variety they stand in as Christians. Where there 
 are many differences, and a state denies any liberty, 
 but strictly imposeth the state religion upon all, the 
 case always falls out to be, that the earnest desire of 
 what we call liberty of conscience, lies glowing in the 
 embers of men's discontent, and is a thing in itself 
 so popular, a thing of so great evidence of reason, 
 when it may be discoursed upon equal terms, and so 
 much the concern of every man but the present imposer, 
 that 'tis very apt to kindle and flame out, and, upon any 
 strait or emergency of the state, either by forreign war 
 or domestic division, to make such an earthquake, as 
 may endanger the whole ; 'tis most prudent in a state to 
 give liberty, where there is least power to demand it ; 
 those may be gained by giving it, that may prove 
 dangerous in forcing it. To force and pen men up 
 in such things is wholly unnatural, and will, like wind
 
 174 
 
 penn'd up in the earth, or the sea shut up by banks, 
 break out at one time or another with the greater 
 violence. Liberty in religion was never yet denied 
 in a protestant state, but it had, first or last, a mis- 
 chievous effect ; to instruct men in protestant prin- 
 ciples, and then put a yoke of uniformity upon them, 
 has no more proportion in it, than to educate a man 
 at Geneva that is to live at Rome, and to breed him a 
 Calvinist whom you intend for a Papist. 
 
 " Lastly, liberty of conscience is the best way to 
 secure us to the protestant faith, and to prevent a 
 relapse to popery ; the protestant religion will be 
 fastest rooted, by exerting fully the principles of it, 
 and a throughout adhering to them ; by our practice 
 in dealing one with another, to deny those principles 
 by which we justifie our separation from Rome, is the 
 ready way to make them return thither again. Teach 
 men, that there is no man, nor men, under any one deno- 
 mination since the apostles' times, that are infallible in 
 delivering divine truth. Teach men, that the Scripture 
 is the only rule of religion, and let them read it : Tell 
 them, they are to follow no men farther than they follow 
 that rule, and that every man is judge according to the 
 best light he hath of that rule, and how far other men 
 comply with it, and differ from it; and that every man 
 is bound to behave himself towards God, according to 
 the judgment he shall so make wit/tin himself; all which 
 are protestant principles, and eternal truths. And then 
 collect the sense which those principles issue themselves 
 into ; and how unreasonable will it then appear, to force 
 men to comply with the belief of others contrary to 
 their own, and, when you have bid them use their light 
 and reason, to punish them, because they will not
 
 175 
 
 oppose it, and go against it ! How can we otherwise 
 justifie forcing men, where such principles are avowed, 
 but by a flat denyal of them, and recurring to those 
 popish weapons of the absolute power of the church, 
 and her uncontroulable authority ; and so, by con- 
 demning others that, upon the exercise of their own 
 light and reason, now differ from us, condemn ourselves, 
 who upon the same at first departed from Rome ? 
 When we oppose the Church of Rome, we justifie 
 ourselves upon the ver} r same arguments by which 
 dissenters now amongst ourselves make their defence 
 against us ; and when we dispute against them, we 
 take up the same arguments the papists use against us. 
 There is scarce any considerable argument urged of 
 late for conformity and imposition, but, if you trace 
 it to the seat, you shall find it in Bellarmine or Suarez. 
 The truth is: he that cannot endure to have any differ 
 from him in opinion about the supernatural truth of the 
 Gospel, and will have no toleration of several per- 
 swasions of that kind, and thinks it destructive to 
 mankind and the being of every stale to suffer any 
 so to be ; that man is a protestant by mistake, and will 
 find himself at home in his principles no where but 
 at Rome. The farther we remove in our reformation 
 from the practices and principles of the Church of 
 Rome, and live upon our own, the less like we are 
 to return to it. If we make use of their arguments 
 and principles at one time, we may come to use them 
 at another, and at last espouse them altogether; and 
 what serves our turns at some times to oppose others, 
 may at last prevail upon ourselves. And so 'tis in our 
 practices, reserving any of their ceremonies may at last 
 bring us to some of their doctrines. He that keeps
 
 176 
 
 a holiday, is within a step of praying to that saint for 
 whose sake he keeps it, especially if he have the wit to 
 consider why he keeps it. He that kneels, and puts 
 weight upon it, is in a fair way to adoration; and he 
 that is for joyning the Cross with baptism, may come 
 to do it after grace, and cross himself in time. 'Twas 
 Bishop Bonner's observation, when he saw the Re- 
 formation, and how many of the popish ceremonies 
 were retained, being asked what he thought of it, If 
 they like (saith he) the tast of our broth so well, they will 
 eat of our beef shortly ." 
 
 " 'Tis imposition in religion sweeps the house, and 
 keeps the nest warm for popery : liberty of conscience 
 mortally stabs it ; where that is once given, it may be 
 said to the pope, as it was to Be/shazzar, God hath 
 numbered thy kingdom, and finished it, and the place where 
 he once tyrannized, shall know him there no more. 
 
 " There is no bond of union amongst disagreeing 
 persons, like persecution; the common concern of their 
 security then begets correspondency, acquaintance, and 
 such intercourse and mutual assistance as endears them 
 above any thing one to another: and for the danger 
 there may be of any party, there is nothing sure so like 
 to remove that as indulging them with a liberty : the 
 best way to be secured against the discontent of any 
 party is to remove the cause of such discontent; and 
 the best way to be out of fear of them, unless you can 
 totally destroy them, is to oblige them ; and so at once 
 to engage and win them over, and thereby disband our 
 own fears. 
 
 " To say, that upon a prudential account, liberty 
 should never be allowed in state, because 'tis that which 
 will unite parties, and bring them to a consistency
 
 amongst themselves, and so render therfi much more 
 dangerous, is to say a thing upon a great mistake. For 
 common experience shows us, that nothing unites par- 
 ties more amongst themselves than a hot persecution ; 
 nor does any thing bring them so much together as that ; 
 'tis like a great storm that drives cattle that are scattered 
 ahout altogether, and brings them to meet in one com- 
 mon shelter to save themselves. 
 
 " Methinks the author should have remembered, that 
 that advice would have kept Christianity out of the 
 world : for if we follow the track of such policy, we 
 shall find that what we now say against tolerating dis- 
 senters amongst ourselves, the papists first said, and do 
 still say against us all ; and if we go one step higher, 
 the heathens said the very same against the Christian 
 religion itself, and thought it a factious, fanatic project 
 of sick-brained men, and a thing not to be endured, that 
 men should not content themselves with the same gods 
 that the rest of the world worshipped and acquiesced 
 in. 'Tis a sad thing, and much to be lamented, that the 
 protestants should take up the dregs of those politics, 
 and make use of them one against another upon every 
 small difference amongst themselves. 
 
 " He that would have the magistrate force all men 
 to his religion, will himself be burnt by his own prin- 
 ciples when he comes into a countrey where the state 
 religion differs from him : to say he is in the right, and 
 the state that does it in the wrong, is a miserable beg- 
 ging the question. If one magistrate be to do it, all 
 are to do it ; and there can be no other rule of truth and 
 error in that case but what they think so. If a magis- 
 trate be once admitted to punish with death what is 
 really and truly in itself an heresie, he may and must, by 
 
 N
 
 178 
 
 the same rale, so punish every thing he thinks so. 
 Where shall the definition of heresie terminate, and who 
 shall set the magistrate bounds in such a case ? Misin- 
 formation, passion, or some sinister interest, can only 
 lead men into such principles, which tend to nothing 
 but to make religion disturb the peace and quiet of all 
 mankind ; and, as one saith well, to bring Christians to 
 a butchery one of another, and to make a mere shambles 
 of Christendom." 
 
 The concluding quotations are made from that 
 standard work, " The Apology for the Freedom of the 
 Press, and for General Liberty, by the Rev. Robert 
 Hall ;" third edition, 1794. Their direct application to 
 the present times requires no comment. 
 
 " The most capital advantage an enlightened people 
 can enjoy is the liberty of discussing every subject 
 which can fall within the compass of the human mind : 
 while this remains, freedom will flourish ; but should it 
 be lost or impaired, its principles will neither be well 
 understood or long retained. To render the magistrate 
 a judge of truth, and engage his authority in the sup- 
 pression of opinions, shows an inattention to the nature 
 and design of political society. When a nation forms a 
 government, it is not wisdom but power which they 
 place in the hands of the magistrate; from whence it 
 follows, his concern is only with those objects which 
 power can operate upon. On this account the admini- 
 stration of justice, the protection of property, and the 
 defence of every member of the community from vio- 
 lence and outrage, fall naturally within the province of 
 the civil ruler, for these may all be accomplished by 
 power; but an attempt to distinguish truth from error,
 
 179 
 
 and to countenance one set of opinions to the prejudice 
 of another, is to apply power in a manner mischievous 
 and absurd. To comprehend the reasons on which the 
 right of public discussion is founded, it is requisite to 
 remark the difference between sentiment and conduct. 
 The behaviour of men in society will be influenced by 
 motives drawn from the prospect of good and evil : here 
 then is the proper department of government, as it is 
 capable of applying that good and evil by which actions 
 are determined. Truth, on the contrary, is quite of a 
 different nature, being supported only by evidence ; and 
 as when this is presented we cannot withhold our assent, 
 so where this is wanting, no power or authority can 
 command it. 
 
 " However some may affect to dread controversy, it 
 can never be of ultimate disadvantage to the interests of 
 truth, or the happiness of mankind. Where it is in- 
 dulged in its full extent, a multitude of ridiculous 
 opinions will, no doubt, be obtruded upon the public; 
 but any ill influence they may produce cannot continue 
 long, as they are sure to be opposed with at least equal 
 ability, and that superior advantage which is ever attend- 
 ant on truth. The colours with which wit or eloquence 
 may have adorned a false system will gradually die 
 away, sophistry be detected, and every thing estimated, 
 at length, according to its true value. Publications, 
 besides, like every thing else that is human, are of a 
 mixed nature, where truth is often blended with false- 
 hood, and important hints suggested in the midst of such 
 impertinent or pernicious matter; nor is there any way 
 of separating the precious from the vile, but tolerating 
 the whole. Where the right of unlimited enquiry is 
 exerted, the human faculties will be upon the advance;
 
 180 
 
 where it is relinquished, they will be of necessity at a 
 stand, and will probably decline." 
 
 " And had this principle of free enquiry been per- 
 mitted in succeeding times to have full scope, Chris- 
 tianity would at this period have been much better 
 understood, and the animosity of sects considerably 
 abated. Religious toleration has never been complete 
 even in England ; but having prevailed more here than, 
 perhaps, in any other country, there is no place where 
 the doctrines of religion have been set in so clear a 
 light, or its truth so ably defended. The writings of 
 Deists have contributed much to this end. Whoever 
 will compare the late defences of Christianity by Locke, 
 Butler, or Clarke, with those of the ancient apologists, 
 will discern in the former far more precision, and an 
 abler method of reasoning, than in the latter ; which 
 must be attributed chiefly to the superior spirit of 
 inquiry by which modern times are distinguished. 
 Whatever alarm then may have been taken at the liberty 
 of discussion, religion, it is plain, hath been a gainer by 
 it; its abuses corrected, and its Divine authority settled 
 on a firmer basis than ever.*' 
 
 THE END. 
 
 715 10 
 
 LONDON: PKINTED BY j. MOVES, GREVILLE STREET.
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES 
 
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