[Footnote 1:  This refers to the Jacobitism of the time, particularly among those who were opposed to the Union.  A reference to Lord Mahon’s “Reign of Queen Anne” will show how strong was the opposition in Scotland, and how severe were the measures taken to put down that opposition. [T.S.]]

[Footnote 2:  Craik and Hawkesworth print the word “seem,” but the “Miscellanies,” Faulkner, and Scott give it as in the text. [T.S.]]

This perhaps may appear too great a paradox even for our wise and paradoxical age to endure; therefore I shall handle it with all tenderness, and with the utmost deference to that great and profound majority which is of another sentiment.

And yet the curious may please to observe, how much the genius of a nation is liable to alter in half an age.  I have heard it affirmed for certain by some very old people, that the contrary opinion was even in their memories as much in vogue as the other is now; and, that a project for the abolishing of Christianity would then have appeared as singular, and been thought as absurd, as it would be at this time to write or discourse in its defence.

Therefore I freely own that all appearances are against me.  The system of the Gospel, after the fate of other systems is generally antiquated and exploded, and the mass or body of the common people, among whom it seems to have had its latest credit, are now grown as much ashamed of it as their betters; opinions, like fashions, always descending from those of quality to the middle sort, and thence to the vulgar, where at length they are dropped and vanish.

But here I would not be mistaken, and must therefore be so bold as to borrow a distinction from the writers on the other side, when they make a difference between nominal and real Trinitarians.  I hope no reader imagines me so weak to stand up in the defence of real Christianity, such as used in primitive times (if we may believe the authors of those ages) to have an influence upon men’s belief and actions:  To offer at the restoring of that would indeed be a wild project; it would be to dig up foundations; to destroy at one blow all the wit, and half the learning of the kingdom; to break the entire frame and constitution of things; to ruin trade, extinguish arts and sciences with the professors of them; in short, to turn our courts, exchanges, and shops into deserts; and would be full as absurd as the proposal of Horace,[3] where he advises the Romans all in a body to leave their city, and seek a new seat in some remote part of the world, by way of cure for the corruption of their manners.

[Footnote 3:  This proposal is embodied in the 16th Epode, where, in an appeal “to the Roman people,” Horace advises them to fly the evils of tyranny and civil war by sailing away to “the happy land, those islands of the blest:” 

  “Nos manet Oceanus circumvagus! arva, beata
  Petamus arva, divites et insulas!”
[T.S.]]