In America, the sixth article of the union provides, "That no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the united states." The national assembly of France has also, with great good sense, and commendable liberality, admitted Christians of all denominations to offices, if they be not otherwise disqualified. The empress of Russia, the late king of Prussia, the emperor of Germany, the king of Sweden, and the king and the republic of Poland, have all granted toleration, and leave the punishment of heresy and schism to the care of heaven alone.. Why is it not so with us?

St. Chrysostom said, he endeavoured, according to the precepts of the gospel, to love his enemies; but he could not avoid indulging. himself with the privilege of hating the enemies. of God and the church. Toleration is not, surely, the opposite of intolerance; it is, in reality, its counterfeit. Both are despotisms; the one assumes to itself the right of withholding the liberty of conscience, and the other of granting it. The one is the pope, armed with fire and faggot; and the other is the pope, selling or granting indulgencies. The former is church

church and state, and the latter is church and fraffic. *

Man worships not himself, but his Maker; and the liberty of conscience which he claims, is not for the service of himself, but of his God. In this case, therefore, we must necessarily have the associated ideas of two beings; the mortal, who renders the worship, and the immortal being who is worshipped. Toleration places itself not between man and man; nor between church and church; nor between one denomination of religion and another; but between God and man, between the being who worships, and the being who is worshipped. And by the same act of assumed authority, by which it tolerates man to pay his worship, it presumptuously and blasphemously sets itself up to tolerate the Almighty to receive it.

Were a bill now to be brought into parliament, entitled, "An act to tolerate or grant liberty to the Almighty to receive the worship of a Jew or a Turk," or "to prohibit the Almighty from receiving it--" would not all men startle, and call it blasphemy? There would, undoubtedly, be an uproar. Who then art thou, vain dust, and ashes!

Sir Brooke Boothby.

ashes! by whatever name thou art called, whe ther a king, a bishop, a church, a state, a parlia ment, or any thing else, that obtrudest thine insignificance between the soul of man and its Maker? Mind thine own concerns. If he believe not as thou believest, it is a proof that thou believest not as he believeth; and there is no earthly power can determine between you.

With respect to what are called denominations, therefore, of religion, if every one be left to judge of his own religion, there is no such thing as a religion that is wrong. But if men are to judge of each other's religion, there is no such thing as a religion that is right; and therefore all the world are right, or all the world are wrong. No man, or body of men, conse quently, can, under any pretence whatsoever, assume the power of governing, or forcing the belief, the thoughts, the reason of others, without impiously and foolishly arrogating the power of God. Religion, as a rule of faith, by which we are to be saved or condemned in another life, must be the exclusive private concern of the individual, in which every man has an indisputable right to follow the light of his own reason, and to reject all authority founded on

the

Sir Brocke Boothby.

+ Paine.

the reason of others. Those, accordingly, who denounce to us damnation, as the consequence of error in faith, and those who would force us to hazard our immortal souls, upon their judgments, who have no concern in the matter, contrary to our own reason, who have so deep an interest in it, are the most execrable of all tyrants.

Mankind have groaned, even in the church of Christ, for more than a thousand years, under a fatal confederation between civil and ecclesiastical power. By this contract for the bodies and souls of men, the mind is first to be enslaved, and then the body delivered over to the secular arm, with its active principle, the spring of all its virtues and faculties, bound up in chains. From this complicated tyranny, even death is no refuge. Its power, in papal kingdoms more especially, extends into the reign of darkness; the miserable mortal, who has not obeyed its ordinances here, who does not go to the grave clothed in the San Benito of their inquisition, and carry in his hand the passport of absolution, is handed over to the agents of the hierarchy in another world, to the discipline of eternal torments. But even our own present mixture of religion with poli

tics, our religious tests, and parliamentary religions, would, I suspect, appear somewhat ludicrous to a person who could contemplate them unbiassed by habit and custom. Is it not a curious idea, for instance, that if a Solon, or a Socrates, were to rise up among us, the one could not sit for a Cornish borough, nor the other execute the office of justice of peace; that Epaminondas could not command a troop of horse; or Themistocles be made a post-captain, till they had made themselves masters of the thirty-nine articles previously to the taking the sacramental test? *

But it is argued (and you will pardon me for detaining you for a moment longer at home) that if regard be due to the tender consciences of dissenters, still more is owing to the opinions of the members of the church of England, who would think the church in danger from innovation. That certain dissenters have talked idly, and even alarmingly, of laying trains to blow up episcopacy altogether, I will acknowledge; as also, that some have even been so intemperate, and have gone so far, as to make sober minded men doubtful of their individual disposition towards that toleration, which they for themselves have so loudly demanded.

Sir Brooke Boothby.

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