and most pernicious in its consequences

that its na

tural effect is to mislead the judgment, and to make. the heart dissolute.

you,

It is a small matter, that the State requires of sobriety, decency, and good manners, to qualify you for the noble employment of thinking freely, and at We have been told this, you your ease. will say, before: But, when it came to be explained; By, sober writing was meant, writing in the language of the Magistrate. It may be so; but then, remember, it was not till you yourselves had led the way to the abuse of words; and had called calumny, plain dealing; and a scurril licence, urbanity. Happy for you, that you are in times when liberty is so well understood. Had you lived in the boasted days of classic freedom, he amongst you who had escaped best, had been branded

if reason and ridicule were of equal importance for the conduct of human life.

He may then perhaps ask, " If I do not condemn the use of "Ridicule, on what employment I would put it, when I have ex"cluded it from being a test of truth?" Let him not be uneasy about that. There is no danger that the talent for ridicule should lie idle, for want of proper business. When reason, the only test of truth. I know of, has performed its office, and unmasked hypocrisy and formal error, then ridicule, I think, may be fairly ralled in, to quicken the operation. Thus, when Dr. S. Clarke had, by superior reasoning, exposed the wretched sophistry which Mr. Collins had employed to prove the Soul to be only a quality of Body; Dr. Arbuthnot, who very rarely misemployed his inimisable talent for ridicule, followed the blow, and gave that foolish and impious opinion up to the contempt and laughter it deserved, in a chapter of the Memoirs of Scriblerus. But to set Ridicule on work before, would be as unfair, indeed as scandalous, as to bestow the language due to convicted Vice, on a character but barely suspected.

branded with a character, the ancient Sages esteemed most infamous of all, AN ENEMY TO THe religion OF HIS COUNTRY. A very candid and respectable author, speaking of the ancient restraints on freethinking, says, "These were the maxims, these the

principles, which the light of nature suggested, "which reason dictated." Nor has this fine writer any cause to be ashamed of his acknowledgment; nor his adversaries any pretence that he must needs esteem it the measure for the present times. For, "as a great Ancient well observes," It is one thing to "speak of truth, and another to hear truth speak " of herself." It was CHRISTIAN TRUTH and CHARITY, the truth and charity you so much insult, which only could take off those restraints; and require no more of you than to be as FREE, but not using your liberty for a cloak of maliciousness+.

I have now done with your buffoonry; which, like chewed bullets, is against the law of arms; and come next to your scurrilities, those stink-pots of your offensive war.

: As the CLERGY of the established church have been more particularly watchful in what is yet the common cause of all, the interests of Christianity, and most successful in repelling the insults of its enemies, they have fallen under the heaviest load of your calumny

Letter to Dr. Waterland, p. 52, & seq.

† Αλλως τὶς περὶ ἀληθείας λέγει, ἡ ἀλήθεια ἑαυτὴν ἑρμηνεύει.

11 Pet. ii. 16.

and

and slander. With unparalleled licence, you have gone on, representing them as debauched, avaricious, proud, vindictive, ambitious, deceitful, irreligious, and incorrigible. "An order of men profligate and abandoned to wickedness, inconsistent with the good of society, irreconcileable enemies to reason, and conspirators against the liberty and property of mankind*."

To fill up your common-place of slander, the most inconsistent qualities have been raked together to deform them: qualities that could never stand together but in idea; I mean, in the mishapen ideas of a Free-thinker.

The Order is now represented as most contemptible for their politics; ever in the wrong, and under a fatality of continued blunders, attending them as a curse: But anon, we are told of their deep-laid schemes of a separate interest, so wisely conducted, as to elude the policy of Courts, and baffle all the wisdom of Legislatures.

Now they are a set of superstitious bigots, and fiery zealots, prompt to sacrifice the rights of humánity to the interests of Mother-Church: but now again, they are Tartufes without religion; Atheists and Apostates without faith or law.

This moment, so united in one common confederacy as to make their own Church-policy the cause of God:

Rights of the Christian Church, and Christianity as old as the Creation, passim.

VOL. I.

M

But,

But, the next, so divided, that every man's hand is against his brother, tearing and worrying one another, to the great scandal of the charitable author of the Discourse of Free-thinking.

But it is to be hoped, as the evidence is so ill laid together, the accusation may be groundless.

But why do I talk of the Clergy, when there is not one, however otherwise esteemed by, or related to you, that can escape your slander, if he happen to discover the least inclination for that cause, against which you are so virulently bent? Mr. Locke, the honour of this age, and the instructor of the future, shews us, in the treatment he received from his FRIEND and from his PUPIL, what a believer is to expect from you. It was enough to provoke their resentment, that he had shewn the reasonableness of Christianity; and had placed all his hopes of happiness in another life.

The intimacy between him and Mr. Collins is well known. Mr. Collins seemed to idolize Mr. Locke while living; and Mr. Locke was confident Mr. Collins would preserve his memory when dead*. But he chanced to be mistaken: For no sooner was he gone, than Mr. Collins publickly insults a notion of his konoured friend concerning the possibility of conceiving how matter might first be made and begin to be:

* " I know you loved me living, and will preserve my memory "now I am dead," says he in his letter to be delivered to Mr. Collins at his death.

Answer to Dr. CLARKE's third Defence of his Letter to Mr. Dodwell, at the end.

And

And goes affectedly out of the way to shew his good will to his memory.

The noble author of the Characteristics had received* part of his education from that great philoso→ pher: And it must be owned, that this Lord had many excellent qualities, both as a man and a writer. He was temperate, chaste, honest, and a lover of his country. In his writings he hath shewn how largely he had imbibed the deep sense, and how naturally he could copy the gracious manner of Plato. How far Mr. Locke contributed to the cultivating these qualities, I will not enquire: But that inveterate rancour which he indulged against Christianity, it is certain, he had not from his master. It was Mr. Locke's love of it that seems principally to have exposed him to his pupil's bitterest insults. One of the most precious remains of the piety of that excellent man, are his last words to Mr. Collins: "May you live long and happy, &c. all the use to be made of it is, that this "world is a scene of vanity, that soon passes away, it and affords no solid satisfaction, but the conscious

66

ness of well doing, and the HOPES OF ANOTHER "( LIFE. This is what I can say by experience, and "what you will find when you come to make up your

account." One would think, that if ever the parting breath of pious men, or the last precepts of dying philosophers, could claim reverence of their survivors, this noble monument of friendship, and religion, had been secure from outrage. Yet hear, in how unworthy,

* See Bibl. Choisie, tom. vi. p. 343.

Amongst his letters published by Desmaizeaux,

M 2

how