nd religious asperity.
Among these, it is, too frequently, the practice to make in their heat
concessions to atheism or deism, which their most confident advocates
had never dared to claim, or to hope. A sally of levity, an idle
paradox, an indecent jest, an unreasonable objection, are sufficient,
in the opinion of these men, to efface a name from the lists of
christianity, to exclude a soul from everlasting life. Such men are so
watchful to censure, that they have seldom much care to look for
favourable interpretations of ambiguities, to set the general tenour
of life against single failures, or to know how soon any slip of
inadvertency has been expiated by sorrow and retraction; but let fly
their fulminations, without mercy or prudence, against slight offences
or casual temerities, against crimes never committed, or immediately
repented.

The infidel knows well what he is doing. He is endeavouring to supply,
by authority, the deficiency of his arguments, and to make his cause
less invidious, by showing numbers on his side; he will, therefore,
not change his conduct, till he reforms his principles. But the zealot
should recollect, that he is labouring by this frequency of
excommunication, against his own cause, and voluntarily adding
strength to the enemies of truth. It must always be the condition of a
great part of mankind, to reject and embrace tenets upon the authority
of those whom they think wiser than themselves; and, therefore, the
addition of every name to infidelity, in some degree, invalidates that
argument upon which the religion of multitudes is necessarily founded.

Men may differ from each other in many religious opinions, and yet all
may retain the essentials of christianity; men may sometimes eagerly
dispute, and yet not differ much from one another: the rigorous
persecutors of errour should, therefore, enlighten their zeal with
knowledge, and temper their orthodoxy with charity; that charity,
without which orthodoxy is vain; charity that "thinketh no evil," but
"hopeth all things," and "endureth all things."

Whether Browne has been numbered among the contemners of religion, by
the fury of its friends, or the artifice of its enemies, it is no
difficult task to replace him among the most zealous professors of
christianity. He may, perhaps, in the ardour of his imagination, have
hazarded an expression, which a mind intent upon faults may interpret
into heresy, if considered apart from the rest of his