FROM the report of some friends who had read your Confessional, ere I had an opportunity of giving myself that pleasure, I imagined your performance was built on a plan much nearer to that of the following elaborate treatise, than I find it is. You aim, it is true, at the same mark, and draw your materials chiefly from the same applauded authors who furnished me with mine. Perhaps it is owing to my vanity, that I still think I have better hit their meaning, and come more roundly, as well as briefly, to the point in view than you have done. If you really saw this my treatise before you wrote the Confessional, you ought to have made me a compliment on having pointed out the scheme of your whole book. As we are both but borrowers and compilers, by no means original writers, either in regard to the matter or tendency of our lucubrations, you could not surely have thought this too great an honour. Be this as it will, I must observe to you, sir, that all your lay readers at least are extremely dissatisfied with that air of worldly selfishness which runs through your whole book. You talk so much of bread, of promotion, of the wealth of the church, &c. as objects you wish to arrive at, without the ugly obstacle of subscriptions in the way, that the laity, who are to be taxed for the levy of these emoluments, think there will be little advantage gained by them in the abolition of creeds, &c. if they are to be at equal expense in maintaining your no-system, as in supporting that of the

present establishment. You may perceive, I take another course, and one infinitely more acceptable you may be sure, to them. The sort of clergy I propose will cost them nothing. Whoever you and I are, especially if we are believed to be clergymen, the world must look on me as infinitely more disinterested than you, and on mine as a more saving scheme than yours, by the entire amount of all the sums arising from tithes and glebe lands throughout England and Ireland. Take it for granted, therefore, that whenever the legislature shall think proper to change hands, they will pass by yours, and go plump into mine, as exactly the same with the drift of our favourite originals, and as incomparably more consonant to the rules of good economy, both national and domestic.

&c. &c.

THERE was a pamphlet published in the year 1708, against abolishing Christianity in England. The title, it is true, was bold; but the author, though supposed to be a parson, was so modest as only to argue for the outward profession of that religion, without insisting on any thing farther as necessary to be retained, than mere nominal Christianity. His arguments seemed so reasonable, that they only abolished the thing itself, but still adhered to the name and profession, because both were incapable of giving any umbrage to the principles and manners of the times.

The author, like a true parson, that is never to be satisfied, encouraged by this unexpected success, had the assurance the very next year to print a Project for the Advancement of Religion and Reformation of Manners; in which, to the great offence and surprise of the public, the religion he proposed to advance, was the old stale affair of orthodox Christianity, as some affect to call it, together with the clog of the church, as hitherto received in these countries; and the manners he would reform us to, were those no less antiquated customs that had been all lately exploded under the unfashionable name of virtue. The nation may see by this example, how apprehensive it ought to be of the encroachments of the church, and how cautious of encouraging a set of men, whose designs are boundless, who are professed enemies to liberty, and who, if not opposed in time, will again reduce us to slavish mortifications, and superstitious prayers.

His project was knocked on the head by these threelittle defects in itself; first, the presumption and exorbitancy of the thing raised a general contempt and indignation in the breasts of all free Britons, whose liberties it proposed to abridge by a narrow way of thinking, and a certain stiffness and formality of living, which was directly opposite to the gay and easy manner they had just began to learn of the French. In the next place there was nobody so stupid but could perceive that it was designed to serve

a party. For as his project consisted chiefly in a proposal to the queen to promote none but men of virtuous, regular, and religious lives, to places of trust in either church or state; who sees not that the promoting and enriching himself and his set was at the bottom? This was too partial and narrow a scheme to take, because there would not have been men found to fill our vacant employments, and though there had, yet almost the whole bulk of the nation must have been excluded; so that it would have been a more flagrant grievance, and a greater abridgment of the civil rights of the subject, than even the Test Act itself. In the last place, the project in itself, was, and is, and ever will be, impracticable. I defy any queen or king either to distinguish the virtuous from the vicious, or the deserving from such as are otherwise. No man shews himself to his sovereign; and I may venture to say that there is not a king in Europe who ever saw one of his own subjects yet. But supposing a prince could distinguish between man and man, would it be consistent with any one refinement in modern politics to heap his favours on a few, and pass by so great a majority of his loyal subjects, for no other reason truly, but because they do not go to church, nor say their prayers, nor worship a God? If he can make it their interest to serve him, what need he care how far they gratify their inclination in the choice of their principles, and in their manner of living? Besides, if what I have often heard, from Machiavel and other great politicians, is true, your honest and religious fools are the most unfit creatures in the world to serve about a court. The narrowness of their principles, and the sickly delicacy of their consciences so hamper both their heads and hands, that they are altogether.unqualified for business. A prince who has a genius equal to his high station, with such a set of precise formalists to execute his designs either among his subjects, or with his neighbouring princes, must make much the same figure that a man of mettle and spirit does, whose hands and feet are cramped and contracted by a severe fit of the gout. When he would make a stride he stumbles at a straw. When he would make his subjects tremble and his neighbours quake with the vigorous shake of his sceptre, he can scarcely wield a pin.

We may observe upon the whole, that his scheme, if it

could have had any effect at all, it must have been only to make virtue and religion mercenary, by annexing places of profit to the practice of them. If the state should once set itself to encourage virtue and discourage vice, it might come at last to destroy all virtue, because the appropriating temporal power and wealth to certain modes of living must be a heavy bias on the liberty we ought to enjoy of living and acting as we please. Now there being no virtue without liberty, whatsoever tends to abridge our liberty tends likewise to the destruction of virtue. He that has not leave to be vicious is forced to be virtuous (pardon the contradiction), I mean, is forced to live as if he were virtuous, which is the same thing with hypocrisy. Had this project taken place, the devil might have complained of foul play, inasmuch as the whole weight of worldly interest would have been put into the scale against him, and a manifest partiality shewn to religion.

Our Freethinkers will teach us larger notions, and more comprehensive principles than these; they will show us that people ought not to be deprived of their civil privileges on account of irreligion or immorality, since they are still useful members of the society, since they serve the public to their own private detriment, and since they generously throw away their fortunes, ruin their healths, and damn their souls, purely for the public weal.

By this the reader may perceive the weakness and partiality of this projector; so I shall take my leave of him and his schemes, and try if I can present the public with others of a more free and generous tendency, founded on a more extended way of thinking, and, considering the times, more likely a great deal to succeed.

I will not arrogate to myself the glory of these proposals I am about to represent to my readers: they lie scattered up and down among the writings of our best English authors, and the world is only beholden to me for fetching them into a narrower compass, by a faithful abridgment of the sum and substance of each, so that the uses and excellencies of them all may be more clearly conceived, and more fairly compared. I shall speak out their sense too perhaps in plainer terms than their authors, who writing against the slavery and prejudice of the times, were obliged for the