rnments on; nay, his everlasting happiness or misery? Or can those
be the certain and infallible oracles and standards of truth, which
teach one thing in Christendom and another in Turkey? Or shall a poor
countryman be eternally happy, for having the chance to be born in
Italy; or a day-labourer be unavoidably lost, because he had the
ill-luck to be born in England? How ready some men may be to say some of
these things, I will not here examine: but this I am sure, that men must
allow one or other of these to be true, (let them choose which they
please,) or else grant that God has furnished men with faculties
sufficient to direct them in the way they should take, if they will but
seriously employ them that way, when their ordinary vocations allow them
the leisure. No man is so wholly taken up with the attendance on the
means of living, as to have no spare time at all to think of his soul,
and inform himself in matters of religion. Were men as intent upon this
as they are on things of lower concernment, there are none so enslaved
to the necessities of life who might not find many vacancies that might
be husbanded to this advantage of their knowledge.

4. People hindered from Inquiry.

Besides those whose improvements and informations are straitened by
the narrowness of their fortunes, there are others whose largeness of
fortune would plentifully enough supply books, and other requisites for
clearing of doubts, and discovering of truth: but they are cooped in
close, by the laws of their countries, and the strict guards of those
whose interest it is to keep them ignorant, lest, knowing more, they
should believe the less in them. These are as far, nay further, from
the liberty and opportunities of a fair inquiry, than these poor and
wretched labourers we before spoke of: and however they may seem high
and great, are confined to narrowness of thought, and enslaved in that
which should be the freest part of man, their understandings. This is
generally the case of all those who live in places where care is taken
to propagate truth without knowledge; where men are forced, at a
venture, to be of the religion of the country; and must therefore
swallow down opinions, as silly people do empiric's pills, without
knowing what they are made of, or how they will work, and having nothing
to do but believe that they will do the cure: but in this are much
more miserable than they, in that they are not at liberty to refuse
swallowing wha