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according to Act of Parliament, and no other kind of spectacles whatsoever. That no man should be capable of serving your majesty, and his country, in any post of profit or honour, unless he first furnished himself with a pair of the true orthoptic spectacles, at some duly licensed shop; and that if any of your majesty's subjects should hereafter dare to see with his own eyes, openly avow himself heteroptic, and arrogantly presume to say that there is any such colour as pure white; or affirm that if men would pull off their orthoptic spectacles, they would be convinced there is no such thing in nature as the legally established greenish tinge, he should suffer very severe penalties of fine and imprison

ment.

We will suppose likewise that great numbers of your majesty's very loyal subjects, after having endeavoured with all dutiful submission to make use of the legal glasses, should declare that though they could see very clearly and distinctly with their naked eyes, many of them could scarce see at all in spectacles; and many more saw objects through them so

very imperfectly and confusedly, that they were continually making blunders and stumbling, and oftentimes got very dangerous falls; in such circumstances, perhaps your majesty would think with me, that to persist in maintaining this optical establishment, would be to transgress the bounds of all rightful and equitable authority, and in its stead to exercise mere arbitrary tyranny, and a wanton licentious abuse of power. But far more unreasonable and unjust is it, to attempt to controul or shackle the speculation of the mind's eye; because nothing can qualify our rulers for the exercise of such a power, but their being enabled, in every question, to distinguish with certainty what is right and true, from what is erroneous and false; that is their being endued with infallibility.

Now if your majesty will but attend a little to the operations of your own mind, you will soon find that the rational assent or dissent of any one of your subjects, to or from the truth of any proposition whatsoever, is neither at your majesty's nor his own command, but can be produced

only by a satisfactory conviction of his mind, that the proposition is true or the contrary. And the grounds of that conviction must often be very different, according to the different complexion of the mental faculties of him to whom it is proposed. When, therefore, your majesty's predecessors thought fit to enact that all their subjects should observe a strict uniformity in theological opinions, they might with equal wisdom and propriety have enacted, that they should all appear with an exact uniformity of visage and external complexion; for the one was just as much in their power as the other, and the only possible effect of such laws or proclamations must be to make dupes of one part of the people and hypocrites of another.

Doth your majesty think it possible, by any number of proclamations or acts of parliament, to make your astronomer royal now believe that whirlpools are the true causes of the revolutions of the planets? Or to convince your physicians that there is no circulation of the blood? How then can any interposition of the legislature

persuade a thinking man, who hath the right use of his senses, that light and darkness are both alike; that the same person is both ignorant and omniscient; finite and infinite; or that one and one do not make two? Yet these and many more propositions, equally repugnant to common sense, must be admitted before a man can really believe the theological doctrines at present established by law throughout your majesty's dominions.

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If ever the legislature shall think fit to establish a baptismal creed diametrically opposite to the present, the majority of the people will still go on to think themselves bound to believe as their godfathers and godmothers have promised for them.

Extracts from the Work itself.

When upon hearing them talk of their three divine persons as of three separate distinct agents, you charge them with setting forth three Gods, they tell you that by a distinction they do not mean an actual separation between the three persons; but that the Holy Scriptures speak of the

difference of

one only true God, under three different personal characters, by the names of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, which therefore, notwithstanding the personal character, must all three be the very same eternal, indivisible Divine Being. And when you reply that this is in all respects the doctrine of Sabellius, they fly back again to the distinguishing marks of three different agents, having each his personal properties peculiar to himself. By means of this ambiguous sense of the word person, their argumentation, Proteus-like, escapes effectual confutation, merely by continually changing the form of its appearance. In short, orthodoxy is a pendulum perpetually oscillating between the points of Tritheism and Sabellianism seeing it come full swing to his own side, the Tritheist cries, "Tis here;' and in an instant, with equal shew of reason the Sabellian says, 'Tis here;' but, like the poet's scenic ghost, it eludes their grasp, and they both immediately find themselves obliged to confess 'Tis gone.'"

Speaking of the Athanasian Creed, he

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