many years, and by acts of penance and devotion, reconcile himself
to the mother church; they pleaded the antiquity of their faith,
brought all the fathers they could muster up, to prove that alone was
truly orthodox, and that all dissenting from it was a sin not to be
forgiven.

On the other hand, the English ambassador's chaplain, who knew well
enough what they were about, omitted nothing that might confirm him in
the principles of the reformation, and convince him that the church of
England, as by law established, had departed only from the errors
which had crept into the primitive church, not from the church itself,
and that all the superstitious doctrines now preached up by the Romish
priests, were only so many impositions of their own, calculated to
inrich themselves, and keep weak minds in awe.

Natura, who had till now contented himself with understanding moral
duties, and had never examined into matters of controversy between the
two religions, now found both had so much to say in defence of their
different modes of worship, that he became very much divided in his
sentiments; and each remonstrating to him by turns, the danger of
dying in a wrong belief, wrought so far upon the present weakness of
his intellects, as to bring him into a fluctation of ideas, which
might, in time, either have driven him into despair, or made him
question the very fundamentals of a religion, the merits of which its
professors seemed to place so much in things of meer form and
ceremony.

By this may be seen how greatly _christianity_ suffers by the unhappy
divisions among the professors of it:--much it is to be wished, though
little to be hoped, that both sides would be prevailed upon to recede
a little from their present stiffness in opinion, or be at least less
virulent in maintaining it; since each, by endeavouring to expose and
confute what they look upon as an absurdity in the other, join in
contributing to render the truth of the whole suspected, and not only
give a handle to the avowed enemies, of depreciating and ridiculing
all the sacred mysteries of religion, but also stagger the faith of a
great many well-meaning people, and afford but a too plausible
pretence for that sceptism which goes by the name of _free-thinking_,
and is of late so much the fashion.

In another situation, perhaps, Natura would have been little affected
with any thing could have been said on this score; but health and
sickness make a wide differe