The laws of toleration provide for every real grievance that these gentlemen can rationally complain of Are they hindered from professing their belief of what they think to be truth?  If they do not like the Establishment, there are an hundred different modes of Dissent in which they may teach.  But even if they are so unfortunately circumstanced that of all that variety none will please them, they have free liberty to assemble a congregation of their own; and if any persons think their fancies (they may be brilliant imaginations) worth paying for, they are at liberty to maintain them as their clergy:  nothing hinders it.  But if they cannot get an hundred people together who will pay for their reading a liturgy after their form, with what face can they insist upon the nation’s conforming to their ideas, for no other visible purpose than the enabling them to receive with a good conscience the tenth part of the produce of your lands?

Therefore, beforehand, the Constitution has thought proper to take a security that the tax raised on the people shall be applied only to those who profess such doctrines and follow such a mode of worship as the legislature, representing the people, has thought most agreeable to their general sense,—­binding, as usual, the minority, not to an assent to the doctrines, but to a payment of the tax.

But how do you ease and relieve?  How do you know, that, in making a new door into the Church for these gentlemen, you do not drive ten times their number out of it?  Supposing the contents and not-contents strictly equal in numbers and consequence, the possession, to avoid disturbance, ought to carry it.  You displease all the clergy of England now actually in office, for the chance of obliging a score or two, perhaps, of gentlemen, who are, or want to be, beneficed clergymen:  and do you oblige?  Alter your Liturgy,—­will it please all even, of those who wish, an alteration? will they agree in what ought to be altered?  And after it is altered to the mind of every one, you are no further advanced than if you had not taken a single step; because a large body of men will then say you ought to have no liturgy at all:  and then these men, who now complain so bitterly that they are shut out, will themselves bar the door against thousands of others.  Dissent, not satisfied with toleration, is not conscience, but ambition.

You altered the Liturgy for the Directory.  This was settled by a set of most learned divines and learned laymen:  Selden sat amongst them.  Did this please?  It was considered upon both sides as a most unchristian imposition.  Well, at the Restoration they rejected the Directory, and reformed the Common Prayer,—­which, by the way, had been three times reformed before.  Were they then contented?  Two thousand (or some great number) of clergy resigned their livings in one day rather than read it:  and truly, rather than raise that second idol, I should have adhered to the Directory, as I now adhere to