some errors and some superfluities, is rather more than any man,
who has not become recreant and apostate from his baptism, will, I
believe, choose to affirm. The countenance given from a spirit of
controversy to that negative religion may by degrees encourage light and
unthinking people to a total indifference to everything positive in
matters of doctrine, and, in the end, of practice too. If continued, it
would play the game of that sort of active, proselytizing, and
persecuting atheism which is the disgrace and calamity of our time, and
which we see to be as capable of subverting a government as any mode can
be of misguided zeal for better things.

Now let us fairly see what course has been taken relative to those
against whom, in part at least, the king has sworn to maintain a church,
_positive in its doctrine and its discipline_. The first thing done,
even when the oath was fresh in the mouth of the sovereigns, was to give
a toleration to Protestant Dissenters _whose doctrines they
ascertained_. As to the mere civil privileges which the Dissenters held
as subjects before the Revolution, these were not touched at all. The
laws have fully permitted, in a qualification for all offices, to such
Dissenters, _an occasional conformity_: a thing I believe singular,
where tests are admitted. The act, called the Test Act, itself, is, with
regard to them, grown to be hardly anything more than a dead letter.
Whenever the Dissenters cease by their conduct to give any alarm to the
government, in Church and State, I think it very probable that even this
matter, rather disgustful than inconvenient to them, may be removed, or
at least so modified as to distinguish the qualification to those
offices which really _guide the state_ from those which are _merely
instrumental_, or that some other and better tests may be put in their
place.

So far as to England. In Ireland you have outran us. Without waiting for
an English example, you have totally, and without any modification
whatsoever, repealed the test as to Protestant Dissenters. Not having
the repealing act by me, I ought not to say positively that there is no
exception in it; but if it be what I suppose it is, you know very well
that a Jew in religion, or a Mahometan, or even _a public, declared
atheist_ and blasphemer, is perfectly qualified to be Lord-Lieutenant, a
lord-justice, or even keeper of the king's conscience, and by virtue of
his office (if with you it be as it is wi