He who examines on such principles as these, which are conformable to truth and reason, may lay aside at once the immense volumes of Fathers and Councils, of schoolmen, casuists, and controversial writers, which have perplexed the world so long. Natural religion will be to such a man no longer intricate, revealed religion will be no longer mysterious, nor the Word of God equivocal. Clearness and precision are two great excellences of human laws. How much more should we expect to find them in the law of God? They have been banished from thence by artificial theology, and he who is desirous to find them must banish the professors of it from his councils, instead of consulting them. He must seek for genuine Christianity with that simplicity of spirit with which it is taught in the Gospel by Christ Himself. He must do the very reverse of what has been done by the persons you advise him to consult. You see that I have said what has been said, on a supposition that, however obscure theology may be, the Christian religion is extremely plain, and requires no great learning nor deep meditation to develop it. But if it was not so plain, if both these were necessary to develop it, is great learning the monopoly of the clergy since the resurrection of letters, as a little learning was before that era? Is deep meditation and justness of reasoning confined to men of that order by a peculiar and exclusive privilege? In short, and to ask a question which experience will decide, have these men who boast that they are appointed by God “to be the interpreters of His secret will, to represent His person, and to answer in His name, as it were, out of the sanctuary”—have these men, I say, been able in more than seventeen centuries to establish an uniform system of revealed religion—for natural religion never wanted their help among the civil societies of Christians—or even in their own? They do not seem to have aimed at this desirable end. Divided as they have always been, they have always studied in order to believe, and to take upon trust, or to find matter of discourse, or to contradict and confute, but never to consider impartially nor to use a free judgment. On the contrary, they who have attempted to use this freedom of judgment have been constantly and cruelly persecuted by them. The first steps towards the establishment of artificial theology, which has passed for Christianity ever since, were enthusiastical. They were not heretics alone who delighted in wild allegories and the pompous jargon of mystery; they were the orthodox Fathers of the first ages, they were the disciples of the Apostles, or the scholars of their disciples; for the truth of which I may appeal to the epistles and other writings of these men that are extant—to those of Clemens, of Ignatius, or of Irenæus, for instance—and to the visions of Hermes, that have so near a resemblance to the productions of Bunyan.