And to say truth, the way practised by several parishes in and about this town, of maintaining their clergy by voluntary subscriptions, is not only an indignity to the character, but hath many pernicious consequences attending it; such a precarious dependence, subjecting a clergyman, who hath not more than ordinary spirit and resolution, to many inconveniences, which are obvious to imagine: but this defect will, no doubt, be remedied by the wisdom and piety of the present Parliament; and a tax laid upon every house in a parish, for the support of their pastor. Neither indeed can it be conceived, why a house, whose purchase is not reckoned above one-third less than land of the same yearly rent, should not pay a twentieth part annually (which is half tithe) to the support of the minister. One thing I could wish, that in fixing the maintenance to the several ministers in these new intended parishes, no determinate sum of money may be named, which in all perpetuities ought by any means to be avoided; but rather a tax in proportion to the rent of each house, though it be but a twentieth or even a thirtieth part. The contrary of this, I am told, was done in several parishes of the city after the fire; where the incumbent and his successors were to receive for ever a certain sum; for example, one or two hundred pounds a year. But the lawgivers did not consider, that what we call at present, one hundred pounds, will, in process of time, have not the intrinsic value of twenty; as twenty pounds now are hardly equal to forty shillings, three hundred years ago. There are a thousand instances of this all over England, in reserved rents applied to hospitals, in old chiefries, and even among the clergy themselves, in those payments which, I think, they call a _modus_.[6] As no prince had ever better dispositions than her present Majesty, for the advancement of true religion, so there was never any age that produced greater occasions to employ them on. It is an unspeakable misfortune, that any designs of so excellent a Queen, should be checked by the necessities of a long and ruinous war, which the folly or corruption of modern politicians have involved us in, against all the maxims whereby our country flourished so many hundred years: else her Majesty's care of religion would certainly have reached even to her American plantations. Those noble countries, stocked by numbers from hence, whereof too many are in no very great reputation for faith or morals, will be a perpetual reproach to us, till some better care is taken for cultivating Christianity among them. If the governors of those several colonies were obliged, at certain times, to transmit an exact representation of the state of religion, in their several districts; and the legislature here would, in a time of leisure, take that affair under their consideration, it might be perfected with little difficulty, and be a great addition to the glories of her Majesty's reign.