Page:Essay on the First Principles of Government 2nd Ed.djvu/311

 What sensible and upright judge would decide a cause, where all the witnesses on one side were by violence prevented from giving their evidence? Those who converse with deists well know, that one of their strongest objections to christianity arises from hence, that none of the early writings against it are preserved. How much stronger, and even unanswerable, would that objection have been, if christianity had been, from the beginning, so effectually protected by the civil magistrate, that no person had dared to write against it at all. Such friends to the evidence and true interests of christianity, are all those who would suppress deistical writings at this day!

Suppose any article in a system of faith, so established and guarded, to be wrong, which is certainly a very modest supposition; let any of the advocates of this scheme say, how it is possible it should ever be rectified; or that, if the truth should insinuate itself, by any avenue which they had not sufficiently guarded, how it could bring its evidence