I have been sometimes imagining this scheme brought to perfection, and how diverting it would look to see half a dozen Sweet-singers on the bench in their ermines, and two or three Quakers with their white staves at court. I can only say, this project is the very counterpart of the late King James's design, which he took up as the best method for introducing his own religion, under the pretext of an universal liberty of conscience, and that no difference in religion, should make any in his favour. Accordingly, to save appearances, he dealt some employments among Dissenters of most denominations; and what he did was, no doubt, in pursuance of the best advice he could get at home or abroad; and the Church thought it the most dangerous step he could take for her destruction. It is true, King James admitted Papists among the rest, which the Whigs would not; but this is sufficiently made up by a material circumstance, wherein they seem to have much outdone that prince, and to have carried their liberty of conscience to a higher point, having granted it to all the classes of Freethinkers, which the nice conscience of a Popish prince would not give him leave to do; and was therein mightily overseen; because it is agreed by the learned, that there is but a very narrow step from atheism, to the other extreme, superstition. So that upon the whole, whether the Whigs had any real design of bringing in Popery or no, it is very plain, that they took the most effectual step towards it; and if the Jesuits had been their immediate directors, they could not have taught them better, nor have found apter scholars. Their second accusation is, That we encourage and maintain arbitrary power in princes, and promote enslaving doctrines among the people. This they go about to prove by instances, producing the particular opinions of certain divines in King Charles the Second's reign; a decree of Oxford University,[5] and some few writers since the Revolution. What they mean, is the principle of passive obedience and non-resistance, which those who affirm, did, I believe, never intend should include arbitrary power. However, though I am sensible that it is not reckoned prudent in a dispute, to make any concessions without the last necessity; yet I do agree, that in my own private opinion, some writers did carry that tenet of passive obedience to a height, which seemed hardly consistent with the liberties of a country, whose laws can be neither enacted nor repealed, without the consent of the whole people. I mean not those who affirm it due in general, as it certainly is to the Legislature, but such as fix it entirely in the prince's person. This last has, I believe, been done by a very few; but when the Whigs quote authors to prove it upon us, they bring in all who mention it as a duty in general, without applying it to princes, abstracted from their senate.