of that union they boast of. I have never been attacked a second time in
any of the towns where I have resided, and perhaps shall never be so
again after my last battle, which was with an old priest, a learned man,
particularly esteemed as a mathematician, and who has a head and heart
as warm as poor Whiston's. When I first came hither, he visited me every
day, and talked of me everywhere with such violent praise, that, had we
been young people, God knows what would have been said. I have always
the advantage of being quite calm on a subject which they cannot talk of
without heat. He desired I would put on paper what I had said. I
immediately wrote one side of a sheet, leaving the other for his answer.
He carried it with him, promising to bring it the next day, since which
time I have never seen it, though I have often demanded it, being of
my defective Italian. I fancy he sent it to his friend the Archbishop of
Milan. I have given over asking for it, as a desperate debt. He still
visits me, but seldom, and in a cold sort of a way. When I have found
disputants I less respected, I have sometimes taken pleasure in raising
their hopes by my concessions: they are charmed when I agree with them
in the number of the sacraments; but are horridly disappointed when I
explain myself by saying the word sacrament is not to be found either in
Old or New Testament; and one must be very ignorant not to know it is
taken from the listing oath of the Roman soldiers, and means nothing
more than a solemn, irrevocable engagement. Parents vow, in infant
baptism, to educate their children in the Christian religion, which they
take upon themselves by confirmation; the Lord's Supper is frequently
renewing the same oath. Ordination and matrimony are solemn vows of a
different kind: confession includes a vow of revealing all we know, and
reforming what is amiss: extreme unction, the last vow, that we have
lived in the faith we were baptised: in this sense they are all
sacraments. As to the mysteries preached since, they were all invented
long after, and some of them repugnant to the primitive institution."