As to Popery, which is the first of these, to deal plainly, I can hardly think there is any set of men among us, except the professors of it, who have any direct intention to introduce it among us:  but the question is, whether the principles and practices of us, or the Whigs, be most likely to make way for it?  It is allowed, on all hands, that among the methods concerted at Rome, for bringing over England into the bosom of the Catholic Church; one of the chief was, to send Jesuits and other emissaries, in lay habits, who personating tradesmen and mechanics, should mix with the people, and under the pretence of a further and purer reformation, endeavour to divide us into as many sects as possible, which would either put us under the necessity of returning to our old errors, to preserve peace at home; or by our divisions make way for some powerful neighbour, with the assistance of the Pope’s permission, and a consecrated banner, to convert and enslave us at once.  If this hath been reckoned good politics (and it was the best the Jesuit schools could invent) I appeal to any man, whether the Whigs, for many years past, have not been employed in the very same work?  They professed on all occasions, that they knew no reason why any one system of speculative opinions (as they termed the doctrines of the Church) should be established by law more than another; or why employments should be confined to the religion of the magistrate, and that called the Church established.  The grand maxim they laid down was, That no man, for the sake of a few notions and ceremonies, under the names of doctrine and discipline, should be denied the liberty of serving his country:  as if places would go a begging, unless Brownists, Familists, Sweet-singers, Quakers, Anabaptists and Muggletonians, would take them off our hands.

I have been sometimes imagining this scheme brought to perfection, and how diverting it would look to see half a dozen Sweet-singers on the bench in their ermines, and two or three Quakers with their white staves at court.  I can only say, this project is the very counterpart of the late King James’s design, which he took up as the best method for introducing his own religion, under the pretext of an universal liberty of conscience, and that no difference in religion, should make any in his favour.  Accordingly, to save appearances, he dealt some employments among Dissenters of most denominations; and what he did was, no doubt, in pursuance of the best advice he could get at home or abroad; and the Church thought it the most dangerous step he could take for her destruction.  It is true, King James admitted Papists among the rest, which the Whigs would not; but this is sufficiently made up by a material circumstance, wherein they seem to have much outdone that prince, and to have carried their liberty of conscience to a higher point, having granted it to all the classes of Freethinkers, which the nice conscience of a Popish prince would not give