Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 2.djvu/78

26 he forbears to name, he might have been encouraged to an examination of books written by some of those authors above described, whose errours, ignorance, dulness, and villainy he thinks he could have detected and exposed in such a manner, that the persons, who are most conceived to be affected by them, would soon lay them aside and be ashamed: but he has now given over those thoughts; since the weightiest men, in the weightiest stations, are pleased to think it a more dangerous paint, to laugh at those corruptions in religion, which they themselves must disapprove, than to endeavour pulling up those very foundations, wherein all Christians have agreed.

He thinks it no fair proceeding, that any person should offer determinately to fix a name upon the author of this discourse, who hath all along concealed himself from most of his nearest friends: yet several have gone a step farther, and pronounced another book to have been the work of the same hand with this, which the author directly affirms to be a thorough mistake; he having yet never so much as read that discourse: a plain instance how little truth there often is in general surmises, or in conjectures drawn from a similitude of style, or way of thinking.

Had the author written a book to expose the abuses in law, or in physic, he believes the learned professors in either faculty would have been so far from resenting it, as to have given him thanks for his pains; especially if he had made an honourable reservation for the true practice of either science: but religion, they tell us, ought not to be ridiculed; and they tell us truth: yet surely the corruptions in it may; for we are taught by the tritest maxim in the world, that