do admit of one subscription,--that is, to the Scripture. I shall
not consider how forcibly this argument militates with their whole
principle against subscription as an usurpation on the rights of
Providence: I content myself with submitting to the consideration of the
House, that, if that rule were once established, it must have some
authority to enforce the obedience; because, you well know, a law
without a sanction will be ridiculous. Somebody must sit in judgment on
his conformity; he must judge on the charge; if he judges, he must
ordain execution. These things are necessary consequences one of the
other; and then, this judgment is an equal and a superior violation of
private judgment; the right of private judgment is violated in a much
greater degree than it can be by any previous subscription. You come
round again to subscription, as the best and easiest method; men must
judge of his doctrine, and judge definitively: so that either his test
is nugatory, or men must first or last prescribe his public
interpretation of it.

If the Church be, as Mr. Locke defines it, _a voluntary society_, &c,
then it is essential to this voluntary society to exclude from her
voluntary society any member she thinks fit, or to oppose the entrance
of any upon such conditions as she thinks proper. For, otherwise, it
would be a voluntary society acting contrary to her will, which is a
contradiction in terms. And this is Mr. Locke's opinion, the advocate
for the largest scheme of ecclesiastical and civil toleration to
Protestants (for to Papists he allows no toleration at all).

They dispute only the extent of the subscription; they therefore tacitly
admit the equity of the principle itself. Here they do not resort to the
original rights of Nature, because it is manifest that those rights give
as large a power of controverting every part of Scripture, or even the
authority of the whole, as they do to the controverting any articles
whatsoever. When a man requires you to sign an assent to Scripture, he
requires you to assent to a doctrine as contrary to your natural
understanding, and to your rights of free inquiry, as those who require
your conformity to any one article whatsoever.

The subscription to Scripture is the most astonishing idea I ever heard,
and will amount to just nothing at all. Gentlemen so acute have not,
that I have heard, ever thought of answering a plain, obvious question:
What is that Scripture to which they are co