good of the whole society by rendering miserable for a century together the greater part of it,—­or that any one has such a reversionary benevolence as seriously to intend the remote good of a late posterity, who can give up the present enjoyment which every honest man must have in the happiness of his contemporaries.  Everybody is satisfied that a conservation and secure enjoyment of our natural rights is the great and ultimate purpose of civil society, and that therefore all forms whatsoever of government are only good as they are subservient to that purpose to which they are entirely subordinate.  Now to aim at the establishment of any form of government by sacrificing what is the substance of it, to take away or at least to suspend the rights of Nature in order to an approved system for the protection of them, and for the sake of that about which men must dispute forever to postpone those things about which they have no controversy at all, and this not in minute and subordinate, but large and principal objects, is a procedure as preposterous and absurd in argument as it is oppressive and cruel in its effect.  For the Protestant religion, nor (I speak it with reverence, I am sure) the truth of our common Christianity, is not so clear as this proposition,—­that all men, at least the majority of men in the society, ought to enjoy the common advantages of it.  You fall, therefore, into a double error:  first, you incur a certain mischief for an advantage which is comparatively problematical, even though you were sure of obtaining it; secondly, whatever the proposed advantage may be, were it of a certain nature, the attainment of it is by no means certain; and such deep gaming for stakes so valuable ought not to be admitted:  the risk is of too much consequence to society.  If no other country furnished examples of this risk, yet our laws and our country are enough fully to demonstrate the fact:  Ireland, after almost a century of persecution, is at this hour full of penalties and full of Papists.  This is a point which would lead us a great way; but it is only just touched here, having much to say upon it in its proper place.  So that you have incurred a certain and an immediate inconvenience for a remote and for a doubly uncertain benefit.—­Thus far as to the argument which would sanctify the injustice of these laws by the benefits which are proposed to arise from them, and as to that liberty which, by a new political chemistry, was to be extracted out of a system of oppression.

Now as to the other point, that the objects of these laws suffer voluntarily:  this seems to me to be an insult rather than an argument.  For, besides that it totally annihilates every characteristic and therefore every faulty idea of persecution, just as the former does, it supposes, what is false in fact, that it is in a man’s moral power to change his religion whenever his convenience requires it.  If he be beforehand satisfied that your opinion is better than his, he will voluntarily come over to