For reasons forcible enough at all times, but at this time particularly forcible with me, I dwell a little the longer upon this matter, and take the more pains, to put us both in mind that it was not settled at the Revolution that the state should be Protestant, in the latitude of the term, but in a defined and limited sense only, and that in that sense only the king is sworn to maintain it.  To suppose that the king has sworn with his utmost power to maintain what it is wholly out of his power to discover, or which, if he could discover, he might discover to consist of things directly contradictory to each other, some of them perhaps impious, blasphemous, and seditious upon principle, would be not only a gross, but a most mischievous absurdity.  If mere dissent from the Church of Rome be a merit, he that dissents the most perfectly is the most meritorious.  In many points we hold strongly with that church.  He that dissents throughout with that church will dissent with the Church of England, and then it will be a part of his merit that he dissents with ourselves:  a whimsical species of merit for any set of men to establish.  We quarrel to extremity with those who we know agree with us in many things; but we are to be so malicious even in the principle of our friendships, that we are to cherish in our bosom those who accord with us in nothing, because, whilst they despise ourselves, they abhor, even more than we do, those with whom we have some disagreement.  A man is certainly the most perfect Protestant who protests against the whole Christian religion.  Whether a person’s having no Christian religion be a title to favor, in exclusion to the largest description of Christians, who hold all the doctrines of Christianity, though holding along with them some errors and some superfluities, is rather more than any man, who has not become recreant and apostate from his baptism, will, I believe, choose to affirm.  The countenance given from a spirit of controversy to that negative religion may by degrees encourage light and unthinking people to a total indifference to everything positive in matters of doctrine, and, in the end, of practice too.  If continued, it would play the game of that sort of active, proselytizing, and persecuting atheism which is the disgrace and calamity of our time, and which we see to be as capable of subverting a government as any mode can be of misguided zeal for better things.

Now let us fairly see what course has been taken relative to those against whom, in part at least, the king has sworn to maintain a church, positive in its doctrine and its discipline.  The first thing done, even when the oath was fresh in the mouth of the sovereigns, was to give a toleration to Protestant Dissenters whose doctrines they ascertained.  As to the mere civil privileges which the Dissenters held as subjects before the Revolution, these were not touched at all.  The laws have fully permitted, in a qualification for all offices, to such Dissenters,