for ourselves, without following the
advice or instruction of any guide, before we venture to choose? The
parliament ought to be at the charge of finding a sufficient number of
these Scriptures, for every one of Her Majesty's subjects, for there are
twenty to one against us, that we may be in the wrong: But a great deal
of freethinking will at last set us all right, and every one will adhere
to the Scripture he likes best; by which means, religion, peace, and
wealth, will be for ever secured in Her Majesty's realms.

[Footnote 9: Swift means here, of course, the Zendavesta, the
commentaries on the sacred books of the Parsees. Not that Swift could
have known much of these Oriental religions; but the names were good
enough for his purpose. [T.S.]]

And it is the more necessary that the good people of England should have
liberty to choose some other Scripture, because all Christian priests
differ so much about the copies of theirs, and about the various
readings of the several manuscripts, which quite destroys the authority
of the Bible: for what authority can a book pretend to, where there are
various readings?[10] And for this reason, it is manifest that no man
can know the opinions of Aristotle or Plato, or believe the facts
related by Thucydides or Livy, or be pleased with the poetry of Homer
and Virgil, all which books are utterly useless, upon account of their
various readings. Some books of Scripture are said to be lost, and this
utterly destroys the credit of those that are left: some we reject,
which the Africans and Copticks receive; and why may we not think
freely, and reject the rest? Some think the scriptures wholly inspired,
some partly; and some not at all. Now this is just the very case of the
Bramins, Persees, Bonzes, Talapoins, Dervises, Rabbis, and all other
priests, who build their religion upon books, as our priests do upon
their Bibles; they all equally differ about the copies, various readings
and inspirations, of their several Scriptures, and God knows which are
in the right: Freethinking alone can determine it.

[Footnote 10: In the discourse on "Freethinking," p. 80, Collins insists
much on a passage in Victor of Tunis, from which he infers, that the
Gospels were corrected and altered in the fourth century. [S.]]

It would be endless to show in how many particulars the priests of the
Heathen and Christian churches, differ about the meaning even of those
Scriptures which they universally receiv