sum up the accounts of the week, and for lawyers to prepare their
briefs? But I would fain know how it can be pretended that the
churches are misapplied? Where are more appointments and
rendezvouses of gallantry? Where more care to appear in the
foremost box, with greater advantage of dress? Where more meetings
for business? Where more bargains driven of all sorts? And where
so many conveniences or incitements to sleep?

There is one advantage greater than any of the foregoing, proposed
by the abolishing of Christianity, that it will utterly extinguish
parties among us, by removing those factious distinctions of high
and low church, of Whig and Tory, Presbyterian and Church of
England, which are now so many mutual clogs upon public
proceedings, and are apt to prefer the gratifying themselves or
depressing their adversaries before the most important interest of
the State.

I confess, if it were certain that so great an advantage would
redound to the nation by this expedient, I would submit, and be
silent; but will any man say, that if the words, whoring, drinking,
cheating, lying, stealing, were, by Act of Parliament, ejected out
of the English tongue and dictionaries, we should all awake next
morning chaste and temperate, honest and just, and lovers of truth?
Is this a fair consequence? Or if the physicians would forbid us
to pronounce the words pox, gout, rheumatism, and stone, would that
expedient serve like so many talismen to destroy the diseases
themselves? Are party and faction rooted in men's hearts no deeper
than phrases borrowed from religion, or founded upon no firmer
principles? And is our language so poor that we cannot find other
terms to express them? Are envy, pride, avarice, and ambition such