r pastor.
Neither indeed can it be conceived, why a house, whose purchase is not
reckoned above one-third less than land of the same yearly rent, should
not pay a twentieth part annually (which is half tithe) to the support of
the minister. One thing I could wish, that in fixing the maintenance to
the several ministers in these new intended parishes, no determinate sum
of money may be named, which in all perpetuities ought by any means to be
avoided; but rather a tax in proportion to the rent of each house, though
it be but a twentieth or even a thirtieth part. The contrary of this, I
am told, was done in several parishes of the city after the fire; where
the incumbent and his successors were to receive for ever a certain sum;
for example, one or two hundred pounds a year. But the lawgivers did not
consider, that what we call at present, one hundred pounds, will, in
process of time, have not the intrinsic value of twenty; as twenty pounds
now are hardly equal to forty shillings, three hundred years ago. There
are a thousand instances of this all over England, in reserved rents
applied to hospitals, in old chiefries, and even among the clergy
themselves, in those payments which, I think, they call a _modus_.[6]

As no prince had ever better dispositions than her present Majesty, for
the advancement of true religion, so there was never any age that
produced greater occasions to employ them on. It is an unspeakable
misfortune, that any designs of so excellent a Queen, should be checked
by the necessities of a long and ruinous war, which the folly or
corruption of modern politicians have involved us in, against all the
maxims whereby our country flourished so many hundred years: else her
Majesty's care of religion would certainly have reached even to her
American plantations. Those noble countries, stocked by numbers from
hence, whereof too many are in no very great reputation for faith
or morals, will be a perpetual reproach to us, till some better care is
taken for cultivating Christianity among them. If the governors of those
several colonies were obliged, at certain times, to transmit an exact
representation of the state of religion, in their several districts; and
the legislature here would, in a time of leisure, take that affair under
their consideration, it might be perfected with little difficulty, and be
a great addition to the glories of her Majesty's reign.

But to waive further speculations upon so remote a scen