that its designs were not so very bad. This very
declaration, which a year before would have terrified the people, in
whom there was then a general submission to the church-government, and a
singular reverence of the Liturgy, now when there was a general
expectation of a total subversion of the one, and abolition of the
other, they thought only removing what was offensive, unnecessary, or
burthensome, an easy composition. Thus the well-meaning were, by
degrees, prevailed on, towards ends they extremely abhorred, and what,
at first, seemed prophane and impious to them, in a little time appeared
only inconvenient.

But infinite is the danger of tampering with national feeling in its
most important point. The mildly-worded decree above cited, cherished
those principles of mutability, which overthrew the church of England,
while new forms of doctrine sprang from every portion of her ruins, all
contending for mastery, and each insisting on the individual right of
choosing, and the uncontrolable liberty of exercising what they pleased
to term religion. The first of these tenets is as inadmissible in
argument, as it is desperate in practice, for if every man has a right
to choose, it must follow that he has an equal right to abstain from
choosing, and thus universal atheism is sanctioned by the over-strained
indulgence of civil liberty, confounding what our perverse natures will
do with what they properly may. And if we found this opinion on the
ground of human free-will, it may be asserted that a man has a right to
choose whether he will be veracious, temperate, chaste, and
conscientious; whether he will be a good father, husband, citizen, or
the reverse; and thus every moral offence of which human laws do not
take cognizance, may be justified by the same plea, that in this land of
liberty people have a right to act as they think proper. By these means
that finer system of morals, which extends virtue and goodness to points
which the mere letter of the law cannot reach, is at once annihilated;
and the peculiar excellence, of the Gospel, as a religion of motives, is
superseded by the licence allowed to rebellious wills, and the darkness
of perverse understandings.

The proposition of the Parliament to consult "godly and learned divines"
was exemplified, by their ordering the individuals of which the House of
Commons was now composed, to name such men as they thought fit for their
purpose. Every known friend to the King had b