Page:Essay on the First Principles of Government 2nd Ed.djvu/289

 in the space of fifteen hundred years, should be rectified in less than fifty, by men educated with strong prejudices in favour of them all? and yet the Augsburg confession, I believe, stands unrepealed; the church of England is the same now that it was in the reign of Queen Elizabeth; and the church of Scotland is to this day in that imperfect and crude state in which John Knox left it.

Little did those great reformers, whose memory I revere, think what burdens they, who had boldly shaken off the load from their own shoulders, were laying on those of others; and that the moment they had nobly freed themselves from the yoke of servitude, they were signing an act to enslave all that should come after them; forgetting the golden rule of the gospel, to do to others as we would that they should do to us.

Could religious knowledge have remained in the state in which the first reformers left it; could the stone they