If that liberty, of which Britons boast the possession, means any thing, it must primarily include freedom of thought; without which there can be no freedom of action. Thus it must mean an uncontrolled power to examine the validity of every proposition offered to our assent; without which power, and the due exercise of it, our assent cannot be the assent of rational beings. If the reformed religion means any thing, it must mean a religion founded by the authority, not of councils and synods, but of conviction, the result of private judgment. True Protestants do not puzzle themselves about the decisions of Trent, Constance, or Dort; they protest against all authoritative dictates; disciples of the meek, the lowly, the humane Jesus, they seek of themselves to judge of right or wrong. Who is most the Protestant, the friend to human kind, and to truth? Those who appeal to the human understanding, and submit to the public judgment whether things are really so or not; or those who say, they are so, they shall be so, you shall acknowledge them to be so, or else----? * Galatians i. 8. Let not weak-minded Christians who think truth not able to maintain its authority without legal enforcements, lament what they call licentious abuses of that liberty on which we are happy to congratulate ourselves: injudicious productions of the pen will always meet the treatment they deserve. Fallacious pretensions to reasoning cannot deceive mankind in these liberal times; nor can truth be obscured, when the attention of honest inquiries after it, is properly exerted. If the little historical sketch which follows, and which in fact, exhibits no more than what we have all daily read, without presuming to decide upon; if it really is that audacious calumny which many roundly affirm it to be; it will doubtless be considered as such: if, on the contrary, it contains undeniable matters of fact, fallaciousness will appear in the angry objections against it; and the writer trusts, the futility of such objections, have already been made sufficiently apparent. The name of David has never been mentioned by divines but with the greatest respect, from the time in which he lived to the present day; and he is always quoted as an illustrious example of holiness! so illustrious, that the greatest instance of purity that ever existed on earth, was frequently saluted by way of eminence, in reference to him, _Son of David!_ so illustrious, that on the death of the late king of Great Britain, many sermons were preached and published, in which, parallels are drawn betwixt him and this standard of piety, in order to justify encomiums on the former, by declaring how nearly he resembled the latter.