Our

sible, it has been usually found to convince men of any truth which is opposed by their interest, or the violence of their passions. adversaries may feel that it would be vain to deny that toleration is the duty of Christians; but they may still hope to preserve their credit without renouncing their intolerance; and they may endeavour to alarm the fears of the public, when they despair of convincing their reason. The struggle with panic fears will be long and arduous; arguments that are sound, and ought to overcome those fears, will be urged and re-urged, for years perhaps, without success; but neither let the friends of toleration be dismayed; for at last, Time, Patience, and the Gospel, will conquer all.

Let us then turn from these considerations, and endeavour to anticipate the false terrors,

M

the specious but hollow plausibilities, which the advocates of intolerance probably may oppose again and again to the dictates of policy and humanity, to the commands of social justice and religion. The task to find and to expose them to deserved contempt, we trust will not be hard.

Doubtless, one of their most formidable phantoms will be, the imagined danger to religion. But what are the apprehensions of peril, to be produced by liberty of conscience, but idle fears, as they respect the Gospel; and little less weak and irrational, as they respect the church; or else the fraudulent pretences of men, who, fearing nothing for the Gospel or the church, are yet anxious to keep those mean and sordid advantages, which the ruling members of our establishment should have disdained to accept.

For what would Christianity have to fear from free examination ?-The sincerest of its disciples answer, it would have absolutely NoTHING TO FEAR. Freedom of inquiry is that advantage alone which our religion claims; and which would ultimately secure its universal reception. Leave Christianity to the free choice of men, and in every region of the world ignorant and superstitious unbelievers would open their eyes, and hail the spreading light of the Gospel they would hear the voice of reason, in the name of Jesus, exhorting them to 'abandon the follies of superstition, and to learn from his precepts to be virtuous and to be happy; they would listen to rational arguments fairly and candidly stated; they would be gained by zeal benevolently and disinterestedly exerted; and would adore the Gospel as Truth revealed from Heaven. Even learned

and philosophical infidels, so long disgusted by the faults of ambitious and intolerant Christians, too truly to be lamented as the faults of our nature, committed in contradiction to the commands of our religion, would learn to blame the inconsistent Christian, but to acquit the Gospel. They also would listen to the plain and honest reasoning of our advocates; their prejudices and their subtleties would gra

*The persecution of Calas, in France, in the reign of Louis the XVth, excited the indignation of Voltaire, and called forth his papers on toleration. If it did not create, at least it embittered his zeal against the Christian religion; of which he was accustomed to speak in terms of malignant rancour which no disciple of Christ could bear to repeat.— Had the French church been tolerant at that time, or had Voltaire judged of our religion, not from the conduct of the French churchmen, but from the spirit of the Gospel, and from the benign character of our Saviour, Voltaire himself might have been a Christian. Colder sophists like Hume probably may be the last to give up their prejudices..

dually yield to the joint effect of candour, generosity, and reason; at last, convinced of its truly benign tendency, by its happy effects on the temper and conduct of its disciples, and satisfied, on an impartial examination of its widely-extended proofs, they would embrace the Gospel, and acknowledge Jesus to have been indeed a messenger commissioned by God to instruct and to reform the world.

And what would the church of England have to fear, either for its safety, or its honour, from the grant of unlimited toleration and freedom of inquiry ?-Artful men may suggest, and timorous friends of the establishment may be too ready to believe, that to consent to the measures alluded to, would be to permit the bulwarks of the church to be thrown down, and

1

the church itself to be ruined by its enemies.