ment by the ill-placed cavils of the sour, the envious, the stupid, and the tasteless, which he mentions with disdain. He acknowledges there are several youthful sallies, which from the grave and the wise may deserve a rebuke. But he desires to be answerable no farther than he is guilty, and that his faults may not be multiplied by the ignorant, the unnatural, aud uncharitable applications of those who have neither candor to suppose good meanings, nor palate to distinguish true ones. After which, he will forfeit his life, if any one opinion can be fairly deduced from that book, which is contrary to religion or morality.

Why should any clergyman of our church be angry to see the follies of fanaticism and superstition exposed, though in the most ridiculous manner? since that is perhaps the most proba ble way to cure them, or at least to hinder them from farther spreading. Besides, though it was not intended for their perusal; it rallies nothing but what they preach against. It con tains nothing to provoke them by the least scurrility upon their persons or their functions. It celebrates the church of England as the most perfect of all others in discipline and doctrine, it advances no opinion they reject, nor condemns any they receive. If the clergy's resentments lay upon their hands, in my humble opi

nion, they might have found more proper objects to employ them on: nondum tibi defuit hostis; I mean those heavy, illiterate scriblers, prostitute in their reputations, vicious in their lives, and ruined in their fortunes; who, to the shame of good sense as well as piety, are greedily read, merely upon the strength of bold, false, impious assertions, mixed with unmannerly reflections upon the priesthood, and openly intended against all religion; in short, full of such principles as are kindly received, because they are levelled to remove those terrors that religion tells men will be the consequence of immoral lives. Nothing like which is to be met with in this discourse, though some of them are pleased so freely to censure it. And I wish, there were no other instance of what I have too frequently observed, that many of that reverend body are not always very nice in distinguishing between their enemies and their friends.

Had the author's intentions met with a more candid interpretation from some, whom out of respect he forbears to name, he might have been encouraged to an examination of books written by some of those authors above described, whose errors, ignorance, dullness and villainy, he thinks he could have detected and exposed in such a manner, that the persons who are most conceived to be infected by them, would soon

lay them aside and be ashamed: but he has now given over those thoughts, since the weightiest men* in the weightiest stations, are pleased to think it a more dangerous point to laugh at those corruptions in religion, which they themselves must disapprove, than to endea vour pulling up those very foundations, wherein all Christians have agreed.

He thinks it no fair proceeding, that any person should offer determinately to fix a name upon the author of this discourse, who hath all along concealed himself from most of his nearest friends: yet several have gone a farther step, and pronounced another book to have been the work of the same hand with this: which the author directly affirms to be a thorough mistake; he having yet never so much as read that discourse: a plain instance how little truth there often is in general surmises, or in conjectures drawn from a similitude of stile, or way of thinking.

Had the author written a book to expose the abuses in law, or in physick, he believes the learned professors in either faculty, would have been so far from resenting it, as to have given

* Alluding to Dr. Sharp, the Archbishop of York's representation of the author. Hawkesworth.

↑ Letter concerning Enthusiasm.

him thanks for his pains, especially if he had made an honourable reservation for the true practice of either science: but religion, they tellus, ought not to be ridiculed; and, they tell us truth yet surely the corruptions in it may; for we are taught by the tritest maxim in the world, that religion being the best of things, its corruptions are likely to be the worst.

There is one thing which the judicious reader cannot but have observed, that some of those passages in this discourse, which appear most liable to objection, are what they call parodies, where the author personates the style and manner of other writers, whom he has a mind to expose. I shall produce one instance, it is towards the end of the Introduction. Dryden, L'Estrange, and some others I shall not name, are here levelled at, who having spent their lives in faction, and apostacies, and all manner of vice, pretended to be sufferers for loyalty and religion. So Dryden tells us in one of his Prefaces of his merits and sufferings, thanks God that he possesses his soul in patience in other places he talks at the same rate, and L'Estrange often uses the like stile, and I believe the reader may find more persons to give that passage an application: but this is enough to direct those who may have overlooked the author's intention.

There are three or four other passages which

prejudiced or ignorant readers have drawn by great force to hint at ill meanings; as if they glanced at some tenets in religion. In answer to all which, the author solemnly protests he is entirely innocent, and never had it once in his thoughts that any thing he said would in the least be capable of such interpretations, which he will engage to deduce full as fairly from the most innocent book in the world. And it will be obvious to every reader, that this was not any part of his scheme or design; the abuses he notes, being such as all church of England men agree in; nor was it proper for his subject to meddle with other points, than such as have been perpetually controverted since the Reformation.

To instance only in that passage about the three wooden machines mentioned in the introduction: in the original manuscript there was a description of a fourth, which those who had the papers in their power, blotted out, as having something in it of satire, that I suppose they thought was too particular, and therefore they were forced to change it to the number three, from whence some have endeavoured to squeeze out a dangerous meaning that was never thought on. And indeed, the conceit was half spoiled by changing the numbers; that of four being much more cabalistick, and there