It has been shown, I hope with sufficient evidence, that a constitution against the interest of the many is rather of the nature of a grievance than of a law; that of all grievances it is the most weighty and important; that it is made without due authority, against all the acknowledged principles of jurisprudence, against the opinions of all the great lights in that science; and that such is the tacit sense even of those who act in the most contrary manner.  These points are, indeed, so evident, that I apprehend the abettors of the penal system will ground their defence on an admission, and not on a denial of them.  They will lay it down as a principle, that the Protestant religion is a thing beneficial for the whole community, as well in its civil interests as in those of a superior order.  From thence they will argue, that, the end being essentially beneficial, the means become instrumentally so; that these penalties and incapacities are not final causes of the law, but only a discipline to bring over a deluded people to their real interest, and therefore, though they may be harsh in their operation, they will be pleasant in their effects; and be they what they will, they cannot be considered as a very extraordinary hardship, as it is in the power of the sufferer to free himself when he pleases, and that only by converting to a better religion, which it is his duty to embrace, even though it were attended with all those penalties from whence in reality it delivers him:  if he suffers, it is his own fault; volenti non fit injuria.

I shall be very short, without being, I think, the less satisfactory, in my answer to these topics, because they never can be urged from a conviction of their validity, and are, indeed, only the usual and impotent struggles of those who are unwilling to abandon a practice which they are unable to defend.  First, then, I observe, that, if the principle of their final and beneficial intention be admitted as a just ground for such proceedings, there never was, in the blamable sense of the word, nor ever can be, such a thing as a religious persecution in the world.  Such an intention is pretended by all men,—­who all not only insist that their religion has the sanction of Heaven, but is likewise, and for that reason, the best and most convenient to human society.  All religious persecution, Mr. Bayle well observes, is grounded upon a miserable petitio principii.  You are wrong, I am right; you must come over to me, or you must suffer.  Let me add, that the great inlet by which a color for oppression has entered into the world is by one man’s pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another, and by claiming a right to use what means he thinks proper in order to bring him to a sense of it.  It is the ordinary and trite sophism of oppression.  But there is not yet such a convenient ductility in the human understanding as to make us capable of being persuaded that men can possibly mean the ultimate