Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 17.djvu/479

Rh AFTER this general Oxford testimony of the dean, in which that university affectionately asserts her right to him as no degenerate son, we shall subjoin that of another writer, whom, it is said, she refused to accept as an adopted one.

"The religious author of the Tale of a Tub will tell you, religion is but a reservoir of fools and madmen; and the virtuous Lemuel Gulliver will answer for the state, that it is a den of savages and cut-throats. What think you, reader? is not the system round and great? and now the fig-leaf is so clearly plucked off, what remains, but bravely to strike away the rotten staff, that yet keeps our old doting parents on their last legs?

"Seriously let it be as they say, that ridicule and satire are the supplement of publick laws; should not then, the ends of both be the same; the benefit of mankind? but where is the sense of a general satire, if the whole species be degenerated? And where is the justice of it if it be not? The punishment of lunaticks is as wise as the one; and a general execution as honest as the other. In short, a general satire, the work only of ill men or little geniuses, was proscribed of old both by the critick and the magistrate, as an offence equally against justice and common sense." — A Critical and Philosophical Enquiry into the Causes of Prodigies and Miracles, &c. Lond. 1727, p. 33, supposed to be written by the right reverend author of the Divine Legation of Moses: which is the more probable, because we find, in the dedication to the latter, p. 15, a similar censure on another part of this collection in these words: " How-