Here indeed may be made three very grave objections, by incredulous interested priests, ambitious citizens, and scrupulous statesmen.  The stocking manufactory gentlemen don’t know how swearing can bring ’em to any probability of covering their legs anew, unless it be by the means of a pair of stocks:  That the hemp-snared men apprehend, that such an encouragement for oaths can tend to no other advancement, promotion, and exaltation of their persons, than that of the gallows:  The late old ordinary, Paul,[25] having grown grey in the habit of making this accurate observation in every month’s Session-Paper, “That swearing had as great a hand in the suspension of every living soul under his cure, as Sabbath-breaking itself;” and that the glass-bubble-men cannot, for their lives, with the best pair of spectacles, that is the only thing left neat and whole, out of all their wares, see how they shall make anything out of this his oath-project, supposing he should even confirm by one its goodness:  An oath being, as they say, as brittle as glass, and only made to be broken.

But those incredulous priests shall not go without an answer, that will, I am sure, induce them to place a great confidence in the benefit arising from Christians, who damn themselves every hour of the day.  For while they speak of the vainness and fickleness of oaths, as an objection against our project, they little consider that this fickleness and vainness is the common practice among all the people of this sublunary world; and that consequently, instead of being an objection against the project, is a concluding argument of the constancy and solidity of their sure gain by it; a never-failing argument, as he tells us, among the brethren of his cloth.

The ambitious citizens, who from being plunged deep in the wealthy whirlpool of the South-Sea, are in hopes of rising to such seats of fortune and dignity, as would best suit with their mounting and aspiring hopes, may imagine that this new fund, in the sister nation, may prove a rival to theirs; and, by drawing off a multitude of subscribers, will, if it makes a flood in Ireland, cause an ebb in England.  But it may be answered, that, though our author avers, that this fund will vie with the South-Sea, yet it will not clash with it.  On the contrary, the subscribers to this must wish the increase of the South-Sea, (so far from being its rival); because the multitude of people raised by it, who were plain-speakers, as they were plain-dealers before, must learn to swear, in order to become their clothes, and to be gentlemen a la mode; while those that are ruined, I mean Job’d by it, will dismiss the patience of their old pattern, swear at their condition, and curse their Maker in their distress; and so the increase of that English fund will be demonstratively an ample augmentation of the Irish one:  So far will it be from being rivalled by it, so that each of them may subscribe to a fund they have their own security for augmenting.