[Footnote 10:  The chocolate houses seem to have been largely used for gambling purposes.  They were not so numerous as the coffee houses. [T.S.]]

There is one advantage greater than any of the foregoing, proposed by the abolishing of Christianity:  that it will utterly extinguish parties among us, by removing those factious distinctions of High and Low Church, of Whig and Tory, Presbyterian and Church of England, which are now so many mutual clogs upon public proceedings, and are apt to prefer the gratifying themselves, or depressing their adversaries, before the most important interest of the state.

I confess, if it were certain that so great an advantage would redound to the nation by this expedient, I would submit and be silent:  But will any man say, that if the words whoring, drinking, cheating, lying, stealing, were by act of parliament ejected out of the English tongue and dictionaries, we should all awake next morning chaste and temperate, honest and just, and lovers of truth?  Is this a fair consequence?  Or, if the physicians would forbid us to pronounce the words pox, gout, rheumatism and stone, would that expedient serve like so many talismans to destroy the diseases themselves?  Are party and faction rooted in men’s hearts no deeper than phrases borrowed from religion, or founded upon no firmer principles?  And is our language so poor that we cannot find other terms to express them?  Are envy, pride, avarice and ambition such ill nomenclators, that they cannot furnish appellations for their owners?  Will not heydukes and mamalukes, mandarins and patshaws, or any other words formed at pleasure, serve to distinguish those who are in the ministry from others who would be in it if they could?  What, for instance, is easier than to vary the form of speech, and instead of the word church, make it a question in politics, whether the Monument be in danger?  Because religion was nearest at hand to furnish a few convenient phrases, is our invention so barren, we can find no other?  Suppose, for argument sake, that the Tories favoured Margarita, the Whigs Mrs. Tofts,[11] and the Trimmers[12] Valentini,[13] would not Margaritians, Toftians, and Valentinians be very tolerable marks of distinction?  The Prasini and Veniti,[14] two most virulent factions in Italy, began (if I remember right) by a distinction of colours in ribbons, which we might do with as good a grace[15] about the dignity of the blue and the green, and would serve as properly to divide the Court, the Parliament, and the Kingdom between them, as any terms of art whatsoever, borrowed from religion.  And therefore I think, there is little force in this objection against Christianity, or prospect of so great an advantage as is proposed in the abolishing of it.