This being our subject, I do not propose to defend an Established Religion and a Test, by the laws of this or that state, or on the principles of this or that scheme of religion, but on the great and unerring maxims of the law of nature and nations:`and when, on occasion, I may happen to apply the reasoning here enforced, to this or that church or state, it will be only so far forth as they are conformable to that law.

And this is all now wanting to determine this long controversy. For the adversaries of establishments having been beaten off from their attacks of the Test-Law, on the frame and principles of our own constitution, by many excellent vindications of the Corporation and Test-Acts, have left this partial question, and appealed to the law of nature and nations. To that tribunal we now propose to follow them.

The Principles of Society, Civil and Religious, here delivered, will serve to lay open the absurd reasonings of those, who, thinking an Establishment of divine right, defend it on the doctrine of intolerance, which makes a church an inquisition; and the necessary consequences deduced from those principles will as plainly expose the mischievous reasonings of those, who, holding a Test to be against all human rights, oppose it on a doctrine of licentiousness, which makes the church a rope of sand. Having done this, from those clear principles, and these necessary consequences, we shall demonstrate the perfect concord and agreement between Religious Liberty and a Test-Law; and, in the last place, detect the delusive Principle, above mentioned, upon which both parties have gone, and shew how it hath led both, as extraordinary as it may seem, to quite contrary conclusions. From all this it will appear, which is one of

the principal purposes of this Discourse, that our present happy Constitution, both of Church and State, is erected on solid and lasting Foundations.

CHAP. II.

OF THE STATE OF NATURE; AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF SOCIETY.

TO lay my foundation therefore with sufficient strength, it will be necessary, though in as few words as may be, to consider the nature of man in general, and of that civil community which he invented with so much benefit to himself and fellows: that, seeing his wants, and the remedies he applied to them, we may better judge of their fitness to, and operations on, each other.

The appetite of self-preservation being indispensably necessary to every animal, nature has made it the strongest of all. of all. And though, in rational animals, reason alone might be supposed sufficient to answer the end for which this appetite is bestowed on others, yet, the better to secure that end, nature has given man likewise a very considerable share of the same instinct with which she has endowed brutes so admirably to provide for their preservation. Now, whether it were some plastic nature that was here in fault, which, Lord Verulam says, knows not how to keep a mean*, or that it was all owing to the perverse use of human liberty, certain it is, that, borne away with the lust of gratifying this appetite, man, in a state of nature, soon ran into very violent excesses; and never thought he had sufficiently provided for his own being, till he had deprived his fellows of the

* Modum tenere nescia est.

free

free enjoyment of theirs. Hence all those evils of mutual violence, rapine, and slaughter, that, in a state of nature, must needs abound amongst equals. Because, though man, in this state, was not without a law which exacted punishment on evil doers, yet the administration of that law, not being in common hands, but either in the person offended, who being a party would be apt to enforce the punishment to excess; or else in the hands of every one, as the offence was against mankind in general and affected the good of particulars not immediately or directly, would be executed remissly. And very often, where both these executors of the law of nature were disposed to be impartial and exact in the administration of justice, they would yet want power to enforce it, Which, altogether, would so much inflame the evils above mentioned, that they would soon become as general and as intolerable as the Hobbeists represent them in that state to be, was it not for the restraining principle of RELIGION that kept men from running into the confusion which the appetite of inordinate self-love necessarily produces. But yet religion could not operate with sufficient efficacy for want, as we observed before, of a common arbiter, who had impartiality enough fairly to apply the rule of right; and power to enforce its operations: So that these two PRINCIPLES were in endless jar; in which justice ge nerally came by the worst. It was therefore found necessary to call in the CIVIL MAGISTRATE, as the ally of Religion, to turn the balance.

Jura inventa metu injusti fateare necesse est,
Tempora si fastos velis evolvere mundi.

Thus was Society invented for a Remedy against Injustice and a Magistrate by mutual consent ap

pointed,

pointed, to give a sanction to "that common measure "to which, reason teaches us that, creatures of the same rank and species, promiscuously born to the same advantages of nature, and to the use of the

same faculties, have all an equal right*." Where it is to be observed, that though society provides for all those conveniences and accommodations of more elegant life, which man must have been content to have done without, in a state of nature, yet it is more than probable that these were never thought of when society was first establishedt: but that they were the mutual violences and injustices, at length become intolerable, which set men upon contriving this generous remedy. Because evil felt has a much stronger influence on the mind than good imagined : and the means of removing the one is much easier discovered than the way to procure the other: and this by the wise disposition of nature; the avoiding evil being necessary to our existence; not so, the procuring pleasure. Besides, the idea of those unexperienced conveniences would be, at best, very obscure : And how unable men would be, before trial, to judge that society could bestow them, we may guess by observing how little, even now, the generality of men, who enjoy those blessings, know or reflect that they are owing to society, or how it procures them; because it doth it neither immediately nor

* Locke.

Though the judicious Hooker thinks those advantages were principally intended when man first entered into society: This was the cause (says he) of men's uniting themselves at first into politique societies. Eccl. Pol. L. i. § 10. His master Aristotle, though extremely concise, seems to hint, that this was but the secondary end of civil society; and that that, which we here make to be so, was the first. His words are: yoμím piv év sẽ sâu Boxer, Bra lò sẽ sử K. Pol. L. in E. 2.

directly.

directly. But they would have a lively sense of evils felt; and would know that society was the remedy, because the very definition of the word would teach them how it becomes so. Yet because civil society so greatly improves human life, this improvement may be called, and not unaptly, the secondary end of that convention. Thus, as Aristotle accurately observes in the words quoted below, that which was at first constituted for the sake of living, is carried on for the sake of happy living.

This is further supported by fact. For we see that those savage nations which happen to live in peace out of civil society, never think of entering into it, though they feel all the advantages of that improved condition in the neighbouring colonies round about them.

CHA P. III.

OF THE NATURAL DEFECTS

OF CIVIL SOCIETY;

AND THE NECESSITY OF APPLYING, RELIGION

TO REMEDY THOSE DEFECTS.

CIVIL Society thus established; from this time,

Oppida cœperunt munire, et ponere leges,

Ne quis Fur esset, neu Latro, neu quis Adulter. But as before, bare RELIGION was no preservative against civil disorders; so now SOCIETY alone would be equally insufficient.

I. 1. For, first, its laws can have no further efficacy than to restrain men from open transgression; while

what