Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/248

 in England, for the great merchants all the world over do know one another, do correspond, and are partners in most of the considerable pieces, and do use great confederacy and intrigue in buying and selling them.'

Amongst other subjects discussed in the 'Treatise on Taxes' is that of penalties considered as a source of revenue, and the discussion leads him to the consideration of religious toleration from the point of view of the political economist and the statesman. The Sovereign, he argues, by punishing the heterodox with death, mutilations, and imprisonments, thereby injures the Crown and his own revenue; and if heresies existed, it was perhaps because the pastors had neglected their own duties, and they ought themselves to be punished accordingly. The true use of the Clergy 'is rather to be patterns of holiness, than to teach men varieties of opinion de rebus divinis,' and their excessive wealth should be curtailed as being injurious to religion; 'unless,' he sarcastically says, it is to be denied 'that there were golden priests when the chalices were of wood, and but wooden priests when the chalices were of gold.' In the 'Treatise on Taxes ' he says 'that many have heretofore followed even Christ himself but for the loaves he gave them.' He constantly had floating before his vision the idea of a broad and comprehensive Church, founded on ethical precepts rather than on any definite theological dogma or creed; the Church of God rather than the Church of England, or of any strictly sacerdotal body. To disbelieve indeed in the immortality of the soul rendered man, in his opinion, a beast; and persons holding such views should, he thought, be under civil and political disabilities. With this exception, the only reasonable penalties he considered to be fines for actual breaches of the peace, even if committed in the name of religion. Such fines he defended 'as being the fittest way of checking the wantonness of men in this particular; forasmuch as that course savours of no bitterness at all; but rather argues a