sistent with all justice and humanity: for it is punishing those, who have not injured us; and who, if they mistake, deserve only pity from us. Nor is it less inconsistent with policy and common prudence. For thus many will be driven from amongst us, who might have been very useful: and such of the same opinion, as stay behind, will be tempted to become either open or secret enemies, in order to free themselves from the hardships which they suffer, and revenge themselves on the authors of them: from which motives have proceeded the bloodiest wars, the most shocking massacres, the most heinous barbarities, that have ever disgraced human nature. Or should men comply against their judgments, and live quietly; from being hypocrites in the great point of their religion, they will too probably grow dishonest in others. And though their posterity may at length be sincere; and so what we think truth be promoted in our part of the world: yet if the rest should be induced by our example to promote what they think truth, in the same way, it will by no means be a gainer on the whole. Fair argument and equitable behaviour are the natural methods of spreading it: and it will never thrive by any opposite ones. This being the case, imagining that God can enjoin religious cruelties, or fail to be displeased with them, is thinking so unworthily and absurdly of him, that few things are more surprising, than the wide extent and long prevalence of so monstrous an error. And nothing distinguishes this age and nation more to its honour, than its entertaining in general so right sentiments on the subject before us.

When and where persecution began, hath been controverted. Some have charged the Jews with giving the first example of it, by extirpating the Canaan

ites, and punishing idolatry with death amongst their own people. But the Canaanites were extirpated, not for harmless religious opinions or observances, but for monstrous and unnatural cruelties and impurities, practised in their worship and out of it: by which, continued through many generations, their iniquity, being at length, as the Scripture expresses it, full; God appointed the Israelites, as appeared by the evidence of numerous miracles, to execute his vengeance upon them which command was probably designed to give them a greater abhorrence of the like enormities; and certainly they were bound to obey it. But they neither claimed any right else to punish those nations; nor any right at all to punish other nations, though guilty of the same crimes.

Nor amongst themselves were they authorized to proceed criminally against any persons on account of their faith or devotions, excepting the adorers of the neighbouring false deities; or of the true one by an image. Now such of those deities, as had been men, had been such dangerous patterns of wickedness; and the service of them all was so full of detestable abominations, that paying them any honour must be of very bad consequences: but paying them those, which they were understood to claim, worse than Atheism itself. And setting up images of the true God had so strong and immediate a tendency to lower the reverence of him, and bring him down to a level with the rest, that the mischief was only one degree removed. Besides, it no way appears, that the Hebrew idolaters held it their duty to be such: but licentiousness, or mistaken policy, or love of novelty, or some wrong inducement of that sort, led them to adopt the divinities of their neighbours: still believing in Jehovah, though practically they forsook him. And therefore, as con

science did not require their false worship, it was not injured by the prohibition of it. Nor must we forget, that God having condescended to be their supreme civil magistrate, as well as the object of their adoration; owning another God was treason, as well as idolatry which never was the case of any one nation in the world besides.

It is therefore amongst the heathens, that we must look for the origin of real persecution. Yet, we confess, most of them tolerated, and even incorporated, a great variety of deities, and modes of worship: because they supposed, that the former might be all true, and the latter all acceptable. And therefore it was not readily concluded from a man's having a religion of his own, that he denied that of the state. But when there seemed cause to apprehend that he did, it was deemed, in some of the freest constitutions, a capital crime: as the known case of Socrates fully proves. There were indeed but few such punishments, because there were but few such offences, real or pretended: for men usually spoke and acted as the laws of their country prescribed, whatever they thought: till the Jews, in their captivities and dispersions, refusing to worship any other God, than the one invisible Maker of heaven and earth, provoked, by so doing, Pagan bigotry; and instead of being the first persecutors, were amongst the first martyrs; indeed to true piety were the very first, Socrates having always conformed to the religion of Athens, and being unjustly condemned as rejecting it. Yet as the Jews were not commanded to propagate their faith, but only to profess it, which however did propagate it in some measure; the number of their sufferers for conscience sake, except in the

time of the Maccabees, was very small, when compared with those of the primitive Christians.

For the Apostles of our blessed Lord, their companions and successors, being intrusted by him with a commission the most beneficial to mankind that ever was; that of notifying to the Jews, that their promised Messiah was come; of converting the Gentiles from idolatry, and teaching all men the genuine love of God and their neighbour, as the way to eternal happiness; became, for undertaking this good work, (though they proceeded in it most respectfully to magistrates, and inoffensively to all men) objects of public rage, instead of gratitude. Nor were they only, but their followers of both sexes, pursued with warmer zeal, and destroyed by more exquisite torments, than the vilest malefactors: nor was the continuance of these barbarities, excepting some intervals, much less than three hundred years. Yet none of them were retaliated, when, in spite of them all, our faith, by its own reasonableness, and the unwearied patience of its adherents, had prevailed, and was become the reigning one: not even the bitterest persecutors were punished for all the murders, which they had committed. Nor did any erroneous Christian suffer death from a Christian magistrate for his errors, for a long while afterwards: nor was any law made for that end, I believe, in one thousand years from our Saviour's coming. In process of time indeed the rulers of the church of Rome, having already introduced other corruptions into our holy profession, supported them by introducing this also. But when they were become persecutors, much truer and more orthodox Christians became once more willing martyrs. Amongst these our first reformers were emi

nent since whose days, liberty of conscience and the religious rights of mankind have been asserted on more solid grounds, in a fuller extent, and with greater consistence, than ever was done before. Nor I hope will the members of our communion ever forget to exercise, either due caution against the open and secret attempts of those blood-thirsty and faithbreaking tyrants, or due moderation towards all, who peaceably dissent from us.

And they, who accuse Christianity of the cruelties, committed by the professors of it, should consider, how much its genuine professors abominate even the smallest of them, and every tendency to them. But indeed these our adversaries, who would seem to abhor a persecuting spirit beyond all men, and complain of our religion, as encouraging it, have singular need to examine, of what spirit they are themselves : and whether they do not by false imputations, and eruel mockings*, the only weapons which they have at command, persecute most unrighteously, (without any pretence of conscience to oblige them to it) both Christian faith, and natural piety, without sparing in several instances even moral virtue. A proper sense of their own unreasonable vehemencies would incline them to excuse, as far as possible, those of other men, and restrain them from going on to bring charges against the innocent and guilty, promiscuously. But though we were all as bad in this respect, as they imagine the worst of us to be, it would by no means affect the truth of the Scripture doctrine, which is far from encouraging force in matters of faith. The patriarchal religion is free from all shadow of blame in that respect: the Jewish hath been sufficiently vindicated and the Christian fully clears itself.

*Heb. xi. 36.