Though wise men saw the design of this carefully-worded declaration, yet indolent, or quiet men, who were willing to hope, caught at its designing moderation, believed that Parliament only meant to reform abuses, and that its designs were not so very bad. This very declaration, which a year before would have terrified the people, in whom there was then a general submission to the church-government, and a singular reverence of the Liturgy, now when there was a general expectation of a total subversion of the one, and abolition of the other, they thought only removing what was offensive, unnecessary, or burthensome, an easy composition. Thus the well-meaning were, by degrees, prevailed on, towards ends they extremely abhorred, and what, at first, seemed prophane and impious to them, in a little time appeared only inconvenient. But infinite is the danger of tampering with national feeling in its most important point. The mildly-worded decree above cited, cherished those principles of mutability, which overthrew the church of England, while new forms of doctrine sprang from every portion of her ruins, all contending for mastery, and each insisting on the individual right of choosing, and the uncontrolable liberty of exercising what they pleased to term religion. The first of these tenets is as inadmissible in argument, as it is desperate in practice, for if every man has a right to choose, it must follow that he has an equal right to abstain from choosing, and thus universal atheism is sanctioned by the over-strained indulgence of civil liberty, confounding what our perverse natures will do with what they properly may. And if we found this opinion on the ground of human free-will, it may be asserted that a man has a right to choose whether he will be veracious, temperate, chaste, and conscientious; whether he will be a good father, husband, citizen, or the reverse; and thus every moral offence of which human laws do not take cognizance, may be justified by the same plea, that in this land of liberty people have a right to act as they think proper. By these means that finer system of morals, which extends virtue and goodness to points which the mere letter of the law cannot reach, is at once annihilated; and the peculiar excellence, of the Gospel, as a religion of motives, is superseded by the licence allowed to rebellious wills, and the darkness of perverse understandings.