THE AUTHOR'S APOLOGY.

June 3, 1709.

IF good and ill nature equally operated upon mankind, I might have saved myself the trouble of this Apology; for it is manifest by the reception the following discourse has met with, that those who approve it, are a great majority among the men of taste: yet there have been two or three treatises written expressly against it, beside many others that have flirted at it occasionally, without one syllable having been ever published in its defence, or even quotation to its advantage, that I can remember, except by the polite Author of a late Discourse between a Deist and a Socinian.

Therefore, since the book seems calculated to live, at least as long as our language and our taste admit no great alterations, I am content to convey some Apology along with it.

The greatest part of that book was finished about thirteen years since, 1696, which is eight years before it was published. The author was then young, his invention at the height, and his reading fresh in his head. By the assistance of some thinking, and much conversation, he had endeavoured to strip himself of as many real prejudices as he could; I say real ones, because, under the notion of prejudices, he knew to what dangerous heights some men have proceeded. Thus prepared, he thought the numerous and gross corruptions in religion and learnug, might furnish matter for a satire, that would

be useful and diverting. He resolved to proceed in a manner that should be altogether new, the world having been already too long nauseated, with endless repetitions upon every subject. The abuses in religion, he proposed to set forth in the allegory of the coats, and the three brothers, which was to make up the body of the discourse: those in learn-« ing, he chose to introduce by way of digressions. He was then a young gentleman much in the world, and wrote to the taste of those who were like him-self; therefore, in order to allure them, he gave a liberty to his pen, which might not suit with maturer years, or graver characters, and which he could have easily corrected with a very few blots, had he been master of his papers, for a year or two before their publication.

Not that he would have governed his judgment: by the ill-placed cavils of the sour, the envious, the stupid, and the tasteless, which he mentions with disdain. He acknowledges there are several youthful sallies, which from the grave and the wise may deserve a rebuke. But he desires to be answerable no farther than he is guilty, and that his faults may not be multiplied by the ignorant, the unnatural, and uncharitable applications of those, who have neither candour to suppose good meanings, nor palate to distinguish true ones. After which, he will forfeit his life, if any one opinion can be fairly deduced from that book, which is contrary to religion or morality.

Why should any clergyman of our church, be angry to see the follies of fanaticism and superstition exposed, though in the most ridiculous manner; since that is perhaps the most probable way to cure them, or at least to hinder them from farther spreading? Besides, though it was not intended for their perusal, it rallies nothing but what they preach; against. It contains nothing to provoke them by

the least scurrility upon their persons or their func-' tions. It celebrates the Church of England, as the most perfect of all others, in discipline and doctrine; it advances no opinion they reject, nor condemns any they receive. If the clergy's resentment lay upon their hands, in my humble opinion, they might have found more proper objects to employ them on;" nondum tibi defuit hostis; I mean those heavy, illiterate scribblers, prostitute in their reputations, vicious in their lives, and ruined in their fortunes; who, to the shame of good sense as well as piety, are greedily read, merely upon the strength of bold," false, impious assertions, mixed with unmannerly reflections upon the priesthood, and openly intended against all religion: in short, full of such principles as are kindly received, because they are levelled to remove those terrours, that religion tells men will be the consequence of immoral lives. Nothing like which is to be met with in this discourse, though some of them are pleased so freely to censure it.' And I wish there were no other instance of what I have too frequently observed, that many of that reverend body are not always very nice in distinguishing between their enemies and their friends.

Had the author's intentions met with a more can-* did interpretation from some, whom out of respect 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 * Alluding to Abp. Sharpe's representation of the `author. H.

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pleased to think it a more dangerous point, 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 Religion being the best of things, its corruptions are likely to be the worst.

There is one thing which the judicious reader cannot but have observed, that some of those pas sages in this discourse, which appear most liable to objection, are what they call parodies, where the author personates the style and manner of other writers, whom he has a mind to expose. I shall produce one instance of a passage in which Dryden, L'Estrange, and some others I shall not name, are levelled at, who having spent their lives in faction, * The "Letter on Enthusiasm." See p. 9. N.

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and apostacies, and all manner of vice, pretended to be sufferers for loyalty and religion. So Dryden tells us, in one of his prefaces, of his merits and sufferings, and thanks God that he possesses his soul in patience; in other places he talks at the same rate; and L'Estrange often uses the like style; and I believe the reader may find more persons to give that passage an application: but this is enough to direct those, who may have overlooked the author's intention.

There are three or four other passages, which prejudiced or ignorant readers have drawn by great force to hint at ill meanings; as if they glanced at some tenets in religion. In answer to all which, the author solemnly protests, he is entirely innocent ; and never had it once in his thoughts, that any thing he said would in the least be capable of such interpretations, which he will engage to deduce full as fairly from the most innocent book in the world. And it will be obvious to every reader, that this was not any part of his scheme or design, the abuses he notes being such as all Church-of-England men agree in; nor was it proper for his subject to meddle with other points, than such as have been perpetually controverted since the Reformation.

To instance only in that passage about the three wooden machines, mentioned in the Introduction : in the original manuscript there was a description of a fourth, which those, who had the papers in their power, blotted out, as having something in it of satire, that I suppose they thought was too particular; and therefore they were forced to change it to the number three, whence some have endeavoured to squeeze out a dangerous meaning, that was never thought on. And indeed the conceit was half spoiled by changing the numbers; that of four being much more cabalistic, and therefore better exposing the