I have seen two or three Gazettes filled with addresses and mandates from the bishops to the clergy. The addresses are such as I expected, and can impose on none but the weak and credulous. The mandates are of the same sort, but were artfully drawn. They order their clergy to make the people sensible of the great blessings they enjoy under the present family that governs them, particularly of the strict administration of justice, of the sacred regard that is paid to the laws, and the great security of their religion and property. This sounds all very well, and may impose upon the unthinking. [Sidenote: _fol._ 367.] But one who reads with a little care will easily see the fallacy. What occasion has a Prince who has learnt the secret of corrupting the fountain of all laws to disturb the ordinary course of justice? Would not this be to give the alarm, and amount to telling them that he was not come to protect as he pretended, but really to betray them? When they talk of the security of their religion, they take care not to mention one word of the dreadful growth of atheism and infidelity which (I am extremely sorry to hear from very sensible, sober men) have within these few years got to a flaming height; even so far that I am assured many of their most fashionable men are ashamed to own themselves Christians; and many of the lower sort act as if they were conversing upon this melancholy subject. I was let into a thing which I never understood rightly before, which is that those men who are loudest in the cry of the growth of Popery, and the danger of the Protestant religion, are not really Protestants, but a set of profligate men, of good parts, with some learning, and void of all principles, but pretending to be republicans. I asked those who told me this what should make these men [Sidenote: _fol._ 368.] so zealous about preferring the Protestant religion, seeing they are not Christians? And was answered that it is in order to recommend themselves to the ministry, which (if they can write pamphlets for them, or get themselves chosen members of Parliament), will be sure to provide amply for them. And the motive to this extraordinary zeal is that they thereby procure to themselves the connivance at least, if not the protection of the Government, while they are propagating their impiety and infidelity. I hope in God Christianity is not at so low an ebb in this country as this account I have had represents it to be. Yet if I compare what I have formerly seen and heard at Rome, with something I have observed since I have been here, I am afraid there is too much truth in it.