It cannot escape you, my Lord, that at present (and thank God for it) the church enjoys a very large majority against the combined members of all the several tolerated denominations of Christians. According to the most authentic calculation, she can produce more than four of her members to one dissenter. So that if the constitution of your committee had been formed upon a fair and righteous basis, there plainly should have been at least _four_ churchmen to _one_ of the other denominations. But here, my lord, strange to tell, you propose to deprive the church of her natural numbers and strength, you take from her, her best means of defence, and invite her into the midst of her sworn enemies! Where is the liberality of this, my Lord? Where is the justice? The first temptation held out to the public, is the _liberal basis_ of your establishment. Is it liberal, my Lord, to deprive one party of more than three fourths of its strength, and to throw it among the others, who have no other right to it, nor expectation of it, but what they derive from your Lordship? No doubt, my Lord, if you can gain your point, and can tempt the clergy into your scheme, there will not be a single Nonconformist, Papist, Socinian, or Quaker, silent in your praise. No doubt your unbounded liberality will be sounded forth, by every gospel-preacher in the church, and every twanging teacher in the conventicle. Ungrateful wretches would they be, were they to pass by unnoticed, and un-eulogised so great a friend to their cause. A friend indeed; whole unexampled zeal and exertions in their favour, must raise their memory to their halcyon days of 1648, and fill their beating bosoms, with well-grounded hopes of once more realizing those scenes, which, but for your Lordship, and a few other _liberal_ men, they little expected to see. But what will the _church_ say? What will _four-fifths of the nation_ think of your Lordship’s “liberal basis,” which is treacherously withdrawn from the established church, to build up the walls of conventicles and meeting-houses? Do you expect that any honest clergyman, in his sound senses, can relish your Lordship’s liberality, for such conduct as this? It is too gross, my Lord, to pass. I am lost in astonishment and grief, when I see a man who professes so much good-will to the pure Christianity of the country; whole well-known integrity and respectable talents, might have tempted the woe-worn church to look up to his piety and pity for relief; whose rank and credit in the world, afford him much ability to bestow it; when I see such a man engaged in a fearful scheme, by which our Zion may be pulled down, and her enemies exalted upon her ruins—alas! for these things I weep: “mine eye, mine eye runneth down with water, because the comforter that _should_ relieve my soul, is far from me.”