urch) should be established by law
more than another; or why employments should be confined to the religion
of the magistrate, and that called the Church established. The grand
maxim they laid down was, That no man, for the sake of a few notions and
ceremonies, under the names of doctrine and discipline, should be denied
the liberty of serving his country: as if places would go a begging,
unless Brownists, Familists, Sweet-singers, Quakers, Anabaptists and
Muggletonians, would take them off our hands.

I have been sometimes imagining this scheme brought to perfection, and
how diverting it would look to see half a dozen Sweet-singers on the
bench in their ermines, and two or three Quakers with their white staves
at court. I can only say, this project is the very counterpart of the
late King James's design, which he took up as the best method for
introducing his own religion, under the pretext of an universal liberty
of conscience, and that no difference in religion, should make any in his
favour. Accordingly, to save appearances, he dealt some employments among
Dissenters of most denominations; and what he did was, no doubt, in
pursuance of the best advice he could get at home or abroad; and the
Church thought it the most dangerous step he could take for her
destruction. It is true, King James admitted Papists among the rest,
which the Whigs would not; but this is sufficiently made up by a material
circumstance, wherein they seem to have much outdone that prince, and to
have carried their liberty of conscience to a higher point, having
granted it to all the classes of Freethinkers, which the nice conscience
of a Popish prince would not give him leave to do; and was therein
mightily overseen; because it is agreed by the learned, that there is
but a very narrow step from atheism, to the other extreme, superstition.
So that upon the whole, whether the Whigs had any real design of bringing
in Popery or no, it is very plain, that they took the most effectual step
towards it; and if the Jesuits had been their immediate directors, they
could not have taught them better, nor have found apter scholars.

Their second accusation is, That we encourage and maintain arbitrary
power in princes, and promote enslaving doctrines among the people. This
they go about to prove by instances, producing the particular opinions of
certain divines in King Charles the Second's reign; a decree of Oxford
University,[5] and some few writers since the