Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 3.djvu/218

210 why employments should be confined to the religion of the magistrate, and that called the church established. The grand maxim they laid down was, that no man, for the sake of a few notions and ceremonies, under the names of doctrine and discipline, should be denied the liberty of serving his country: as if places would go a begging unless brownists, familists, sweet-singers, quakers, anabaptists, and muggletonians, would take them off our hands.

I have been sometimes imagining this scheme brought to perfection, and how diverting it would be to see half a dozen sweet-singers on the bench in their ermines, and two or three quakers with their white staves at court. I can only say, this project is the very counterpart of the late king James's design, which he took up as the best method for introducing his own religion, under the pretext of a universal liberty of conscience, and that no difference in religion should make any in his favour. Accordingly, to save appearances, he dealt some employments among dissenters of most denominations; and what he did was no doubt, in pursuance of the best advice he could get at home or abroad; but the church thought it the most dangerous step he could take for her destruction. It is true king James admitted papists among the rest, which the whigs would not: but this is sufficiently made up by a material circumstance, wherein they seem to have much out-done that prince, and to have carried their liberty of conscience to a higher point, having granted it to all the classes of freethinkers, (which the nice conscience of a popish prince would not give him leave to do) and were therein mightily overseen;