ours and Passions of
People, who are all at quiet, on float, and make a Fermentation, and
raise a Persecution against particular People, seems perfectly settled, by
yielding to your own Terms.

IV. Let me here add, that I am apt to think, that when you draw up your
Law, you will find it so very difficult to settle the Point of _Decency_
in Writing, in respect to all the various kinds of _Irony_ and _Ridicule_,
that you will be ready to lay aside your Project; and that you will be no
more able to settle that _Point of Decency_, than you would be to settle
by Law, that _Cleanliness_ in Clothes, and that Politeness in Dress,
Behaviour, and Conversation, which become Men of Quality and Fortune in
the World, and should be habitual to them: And that, if you are able to do
that to your own Satisfaction, you will find it very difficult to engage
the Lawmakers in your Project. For I am persuaded, that if our Lawmakers
were, out of a rational Principle, disposed to give Liberty by Law to
_serious_ Opposition to publickly receiv'd Notions, they would not think
it of much Importance to make a _Law_ about a Method of _Irony_. They will
naturally conclude, that if Men may and ought to be allow'd to write
_seriously_ in Opposition to publickly receiv'd Doctrines, they should be
allow'd to write in their own way; and will be unwilling to be depriv'd of
ingenious and witty Discourses, or such as some of them will judge so,
about a Subject wherein _serious free_ Discourse is allow'd. Besides, I am
apt to think, that you, upon consideration of the Advantages which the
Church has receiv'd from the _Berkenheads_, the _Heylins_, the _Ryves's_,
the _Needhams_, the _Lestranges_, the _Nalsons_, the _Lesleys_, the
_Oldesworths_, and others, in their _Mercurius Aulicus_'s, their
_Mercurius Pragmaticus's_, their _Mercurius Rusticus's_, their
_Observators_[63], their _Heraclitus Ridens_'s, _Rehearsals_, their
_Examiners_[64], and the three Volumes against the _Rights of the Church_;
from the _Butlers_ in their _Hudibras_'s, and other Burlesque Works upon
the Religion and Religious Conduct of the Dissenters; or from the
_Eachards_, the _Tom Browns_, and _Swifts_; or from the _Parkers_[65],
_Patricks_[66], _Souths_[67], _Sherlocks_[68], _Atterburys_[69], and
_Sacheverels_[70]; in their Discourses, and Tracts against the
Nonconformists, Whigs, Low-Church-men, and Latitudinarians; and other such
ironical, satirical, and polemical Divines; and from suc