by the avarice, ambition, and ill lives of our priests, will return to it again, when the cause of their apostacy is removed. To this the dispersion of church wealth among the laity will contribute not a little, by putting them again in good humour. They will quickly begin to think more favourably of a religion they are to lose nothing by. Money is so scarce, and religions so abound in these times, that Christianity can never be introduced into these countries, unless it come for nothing.

Having thus cleared the ground by removing these two encumbrances of church and clergy, let us next see what we had best put in their places, and how we may contrive to prevent their being re-established.

My authors are much divided on this article: some are for never tolerating any such thing as clergymen in these nations for the future. They say every fibre of the clerical thorn ought to be rooted out of Christ's vineyard, lest it should again increase, and overspread the whole; that the core of this corruption ought to be entirely cut out, and purged away from the Christian body, lest it fester, and mortify, and infect the vitals; and that if we suffer clergy of any kind, or in any sense of the word to live among us, they will certainly bring back the church, and render the profession of Christianity so expensive again, that nobody will care to meddle with it.

Others disapprove of this extremity; because, in their opinion, Christianity can never be divulged among us, without some such kind of men; and their reason for being of that opinion is this. Christian religion, say they, is contained in an old book called the Bible; so that unless the people be able to read, though it is in English, they will be never the wiser for what it contains. The clergy therefore that they would have, are such as can read, and their whole employment to teach children to know their letters, to make syllables of letters, and to make words of syllables. To prevent their encroaching again upon the laity, as they have formerly done, there must be a law made, that if any of these teachers shall take above a penny a quarter per child, and be legally convicted of the crime, even by the affirmation of any one in the school, he shall be immediately hanged. If he be convicted of teaching his children any formula of re

ligious principles, or explaining any part of the Bible to them, or catechising them, he shall be forthwith sentenced to be torn to pieces at horse-tails. If he be convicted of receiving a present from any body, of sneaking or sauntering within half a mile of any gentleman's house, as if he wanted to be asked to dine with the servants, or of fingering one farthing of any kind of money belonging to any body else, under any pretence whatsoever, beyond his own quarterly penny, that he shall be instantly burned alive. That in order to have these laws more effectually executed, any neighbouring justice or country squire may take cognizance of the aforesaid crimes, and upon the affirmation of any one person, not under the age of four years, proceed immediately to sentence and execution. It is thought (and I think not without reason) that these laws will sufficiently guard us against the usurpations of priestcraft, provided they be duly executed; and there is all the reason in the world to hope they will, since the execution is committed to those very persons who will first feel the ill effects of their encroachments, should they be suffered to raise their heads again. It is the country squire, or the man of landed interest, whose estate may be subjected to tithes, that has most reason to be apprehensive of the clergy; to those therefore it will be most prudent to commit those laws that are to prevent the growth of the church.

Some there are who seem still to have so much of their old prejudices unconquered, as to imagine that the Christian religion can never be taught, unless there be some persons to teach it; that the people would be too indifferent about it, if they were bred up in an entire ignorance of it, to get themselves instructed in its principles when they come to years; and that many of them are too poor to have their children taught to read, even at a penny a quarter. For these reasons they are of opinion that it is in some sort necessary to have certain persons publicly appointed to teach the principles of the Christian religion. They wish this could be done without expense or danger. But here is the difficulty. How shall we get people to instruct us, who will take nothing for their pains? How shall we get such persons as will infallibly teach us Christianity in its utmost purity, and set examples agreeable to the strictness of its morality?

It is not easy to get over this rub. However I will offer one expedient, which may perhaps deserve to be considered. I believe it is agreed on all hands, that if there could be a man found entirely free from all appetites, desires, and passions, he would make a very good clergyman, because he would never be tempted by ambition, or avarice, or luxury, to encroach upon the laity. But it is impossible to get such a one, unless he is absolutely out of the need of meat, drink, and clothes; because he that stands in need of meat and drink, will certainly desire them, and this desire will in all probability, as is usual, transport him to the luxurious excess of choosing beef before Poor-John, and wine before water. Again, if he cannot subsist without clothes, who knows, but instead of wearing a mat, he may have the pride to make his cassock of a cadda, or somewhat even finer than that, which the laity truly must pay for, that the good man may apply himself to the instruction of the people, without any worldly lets or hinderances. All the expensive refinement and luxurious delicacy observed at the tables of the great, though one could scarce imagine it, is founded on the necessity we are under of eating and drinking; and all the finery and foppery of the world is owing to our not being able to go naked. Now if we would have a clergyman free from all that luxury, gluttony, avarice, and pride, which proceed from these natural wants, as their first principles, he should be able to live without meat or drink, and be weather-proof, any place from Nova Zembla to the Cape of Good Hope, without a stitch of clothes on him.

First as to wearing of clothes; it will be allowed me that men are capable of going naked, if they be accustomed to it from their infancy, as is manifest from the examples of many nations in America. Nay, the experiment is now made at home with very tolerable success, so that many of our poorer sort have been made, by a like treatment, little inferior to horses or asses, in bearing the injuries of the weather. Now if we should send none to our colleges but such as have been accustomed to hardships of this kind from their infancy, they might be trained up in a few years so as to need no more garments than our first parents did in their state of innocency. If they were accustomed to

sleep on the ground, and had their clothes withdrawn by degrees, as they could bear the cold, by the time they commenced bachelors, they might strip to their shirts, and the degree of masters might be taken by them quite naked.

It is not so easy to propose a practicable method for breeding them up to an independency on meat and drink; notwithstanding I hope it may be done. Many instances may be given of people who have lived so many days without food that they got over the desire, and even seemed to survive the necessity of it. The woman who took up her lodging in the church of Talla, and lived there twenty-eight days, without either meat or drink, is still fresh in every body's memory. It is true she died soon after, but it is very likely her death was occasioned by the meat they thrust down her throat. Who knows but she might have been immortal, if it had not been for this violence? Buchanan gives an account in his History of Scotland, of a man who could at any time fast thirty, forty, or fifty days at once, without receiving the least hurt by it. It is likely enough that the celebrated parsimony and abstemiousness of the Scotch may bring them nearer to a possibility of living entirely without food than any other nation; for which reason we may choose out our candidates for holy orders from among such of them as have been least accustomed to food. If there ever was a kale garden in the family since the memory of man, it should incapacitate the whole race for the ministry, because the habit of feeding plentifully or sparingly, or eating or not eating at all, often depends very much upon the hereditary practice of the family. There are families of the East Indians, who by being constantly employed from generation to generation in the pearl fishery, frequently produce men that are able to hold their breath half an hour under water. Suppose now, that food is as necessary to life as breath; yet if we consider that we are commonly obliged to breath about twelve times in a minute, and not eat over once in every twelve hours, it will be found upon a fair computation, that he who abstains from air for half an hour, has gone as far in that article as he who abstains from food for fifty or sixty years. I cannot see why nature should not be as pliant to custom in the one respect as the other. Why can we not make the ex

periment however? Let us take the aforesaid lads, whom we are inuring to nakedness, and, withdrawing an ounce of their allowance every day, try if we can bring them to subsist without aliment. I am confident that if they are carefully culled out of those families, who, upon searching the rent-roll of landlords, are found to pay the greatest sums per acre, they may be easily brought to live without any other nourishment, at least, than such as the bramble and the hawthorn may afford them: they are almost able to do it already a little more practice would qualify them to live a pure spiritual life, above all dependency on matter. If this scheme were once set a foot, we might then have religion, which has hitherto been so intolerably expensive to us, taught, without costing us a farthing, and taught too in its utmost purity; for these holy men, so far removed above gross and carnal food, so exempted from the wants and weaknesses of other men, could never be tempted to mislead us out of worldly views. With what confidence might such men as these preach up abstinence and fasting, who could fast all their lives? With what a good grace could they inveigh against foppery, with all the pomps and vanities of the world, who could make a coat of their own skin, and go stark-naked? With what a becoming humility would religion appear in those open and undisguised pastors? They must be perfectly ingenuous and sincere, because they could have no inducement to inculcate what they did not believe themselves, no temptation to pluralities, no insatiable thirst after higher promotion to carry off their thoughts from their duty. The laity would always be in perfect good-humour with them, because church-lands and endowments, with all the exactions of ecclesiastical courts, would then be given up tithes and small dues, about which such a coil is kept between parson and parishioner, would be no more.

The better to set forward this scheme, all the books that have ever been wrote on religious affairs since the closing of the scriptural canon, ought to be burnt. It is impossible to restore the purity of Divine revelation, without purging away all the dross of human invention, with which it is clogged and encumbered. By putting this in practice, we shall replace ourselves where John the evangelist left us,