Secondly, a rebellious subject is still a subject _de jure_, though not _de facto_; by right, though not by deed: and so the most cursed atheist that is, ought by right to be the subject of God, and ought to be punished not as a just enemy, but as a disloyal traitor. Which is confessed by himself: _this fourth sin_ (that is, of those who do not by word and deed confess one God, the supreme King of Kings) _in the natural kingdom of God is the crime of high treason, for it is a denial of Divine power, or atheism_. Then an atheist is a traitor to God, and punishable as a disloyal subject, not as an enemy. Lastly, it is an absurd and dishonourable assertion, to make our obedience to God to depend upon our weakness, because we cannot help it, and not upon our gratitude, because we owe our being and preservation to him. _Who planteth a vineyard, and eateth not of the fruit thereof? And who feedeth a flock, and eateth not of the milk of the flock?_ And again, _Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory, and honour and power; for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created_. But it were much better, or at least not so ill, to be a downright atheist, than to make God to be such a thing as he doth, and at last thrust him into the Devil’s office, to be the cause of all sin. _T. H._ Though this bishop, as I said, had but a weak attention in reading, and little skill in examining the force of an argument, yet he knew men, and the art, without troubling their judgments, to win their assents by exciting their passions. One rule of his art was to give his reader what he would have him swallow, a part by itself, and in the nature of news, whether true or not. Knowing that the unlearned, that is most men, are content to believe, rather than be troubled with examining, therefore, a little before, he put these words, _T. H. no friend to religion_, in the margin. And in this place, before he offer at any confutation, he says my principles are brim full of _prodigious impieties_. And at the next paragraph, in the margin, he puts that _I excuse atheism_. This behaviour becomes neither a bishop, nor a Christian, nor any man that pretends to good education. Fear of invisible powers, what is it else in savage people, but the fear of somewhat they think a God? What invisible power does the reason of a savage man suggest unto him, but those phantasms of his sleep, or his distemper, which we frequently call ghosts, and the savages thought gods; so that the fear of a God, though not of the true one, to them was the beginning of religion, as the fear of the true God was the beginning of wisdom to the Jews and Christians? Ignorance of second causes made men fly to some first cause, the fear of which bred devotion and worship. The ignorance of what that power might do, made them observe the order of what he had done; that they might guess by the like order, what he was to do another time. This was their prognostication. What