II. The other system is that invented by, and (I wish I could say) peculiar to THE ENEMIES OF OUR HOLY FAITH; at the head of which stand the two famous authors of THE RIGHTS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH, and of THE INDEPENDENT WHIG. The true design of these books is evidently this, to persuade us that the Christian and all other churches, in their natural state, without coercive power, are creatures of the civil magistrate. For while the pretended drift be to shew from whence an Established Church receives its coercive powers, the arguments they employ conclude against a church's natural independency in any condition whatsoever. But it is curious to observe the different routes this noble pair of athletes have taken to arrive at the same place:

The author of THE RIGHTS comes first.

At, quum aspicias tristem, frugi censeas.

He hath taken up the argument of Hobbes; and affects the tenderest concern for the good and happiness of the state. So that whenever a church comes in his way, he falls upon it with the old battery of imperium in imperio. But, in this, less honest than that unlucky philosopher. Hobbes* owned the tendency of his argument; and inforced it for the sake of that very tendency. But this writer seems willing you should believe that it concludes only against a High Church Clergy.

The writer of THE INDEPENDENT WHIG, who appears to have more vivacity than his formal brother, is for quicker dispatch. His ready road led him on to the destruction of all Church Officers, and the very being of a Ministry: which that he might the easier

• See note [I] at the end of this Book.

bring about, he has represented all public rites, and assemblies for worship, as impertinent; by shewing the natural inefficacy of prayer for obtaining our petitions; which again (for, to do him justice, he is very consequential), he establishes on the doctrine of fate. This he well saw would bring on a thorough dependency: a dependency that was like to last; as being produced by the destruction of the society itself. And yet, after all this, he hath the honest confidence to talk of the church as of a society. But a society without officers, degrees of subordination, and powers adapted to its nature, being as inconsistent, unintelligible an idea as a house without walls, roof, or apartments; we must conclude that he who so talks, intends to give us a society in words, but to deprive us of it in reality.

In earnest, I do not know a greater insult ever put on the understandings of men than by these two writers; while it was presumed that the gloom of equivocation, which spreads itself through the formal chapters of the one; and the glare of puerile declamation, that tinsels over the trite essays of the other, could hide their true end from the observation of those whose destruction they were conspiring. For, as Tully says of the two assassin gladiators, Par est improbitas, eadem impudentia, gemina audacia; & ubi, Quirites, multa audacter, multa improbè, multa perfidiosè facta videtis, ibi sCELUS quoque latere inter illa tot flagitia putatote *.

Let the reader then but attentively consider what hath been here said of the different natures of civil and religious society, and he will need nothing more than the plain principles, deduceable from thence, to

Orat. pro Sex. Ros. Amer.

unravel

unravel all the silly sophistry which makes up the bulk of these two famous performances; though the first of them, the parent of the other, hath imposed upon a great writer *; and, as it is pretended, was planned by the assistance of one still greater †.

On the whole, how different soever these Highchurch and Free-thinking system-makers would have their notions thought from Popery and Infidelity, they are unavoidably drawn, by the alacrity of their own heaviness, into the very centers of Malmsbury and Rome; from whence indeed they derived their birth; but are, I know not how, ungraciously ashamed of their progenitors.

NOTES TO BOOK I.

P. 34. [A]

THIS will aid us to resolve a doubtful question; namely, Whether a banished man be a subject of the state from which he hath been expelled? Hobbes and Puffendorf hold the negative; and Tully, with the excellent Lord Chancellor Hyde, the affirmative. The former, in support of their opinion, say, that, by the very act of expulsion, the state gives up and renounces all right of subjection: the latter only appeal to the practice of societies; the reason of which practice, as here given, seems to determine the question in their favour.

P. 43. [B]. Whoever reads what is here said of the different views and ends which God and men had in instituting the two several communities, Civil and Religious, cannot but be surprised at the extreme ignorance or inattention of J. J. Rousseau, Citizen of Geneva, who, in his Contract Social, speaking of the means employed by the ancient lawgivers to procure submission to their laws, concludes his observations in these words" Il ne faut pas, de tout ceci, con"Il "clurre avec WARBURTON que la politique et la religion aient, parmi nous, UN OBJECT COMMUN; "mais, dans l'origine des nations l'une sert d'instru"ment à l'autre." p. 59. "But from all this we are not to conclude with WARBURTON, that civil "policy and religion have, amongst us, one COM

MON OBJECT; but in the origin of nations, one

"was made an instrument to the other."-Now this whole chapter of the Alliance is written for no other purpose than to prove that Civil Policy and Religion had not ONE COMMON OBJECT, but Two, entirely different and distinct. The very thing which possibly misled him (viz. the title of my book, The Alliance between Church and State) had he duly attended to it, would have set him right: for the word Alliance, when used, as here, in a civil sense, and applied to Church and State, shews that, in my opinion, Policy and Religion HAD NOT ONE COMMON OBJECT: because an Alliance between two communities implies the independency of each: but had the Church and State one common object, this would destroy the independency of one, in order to avoid, what of necessity must be avoided, an imperium in imperio. If Mr. Rousseau, by the common object held by Warburton, means, the good of mankind, he either trifles or prevaricates. In this sense, all the ordinances of God, all the legitimate institutions of man, have one common object. The consequence of all this is, that either Warburton or Rousseau was here upon a subject which he did not understand. Yet this is the man who says to Christophe de Beaumont, Archeveque de Paris, " Monseigneur, j'ai " cherché la verité dans les livres; je n'y ai trouvé que le mensonge & l'erreur-C'est souvent un petit mal de ne pas entendre un auteur qu'on lit: "mais c'en est un grand quand on le refute, et un "tres grand quand on le diffame."

"

But if this writer be consequent, the principle, that Civil Policy and Religion have one common object, is his own: for he holds, that though the Magistrate ought to tolerate Religions already introduced and spread abroad in the community, yet

he