The first of these tenets is as inadmissible in
argument, as it is desperate in practice, for if every man has a right
to choose, it must follow that he has an equal right to abstain from
choosing, and thus universal atheism is sanctioned by the over-strained
indulgence of civil liberty, confounding what our perverse natures will
do with what they properly may. And if we found this opinion on the
ground of human free-will, it may be asserted that a man has a right to
choose whether he will be veracious, temperate, chaste, and
conscientious; whether he will be a good father, husband, citizen, or
the reverse; and thus every moral offence of which human laws do not
take cognizance, may be justified by the same plea, that in this land of
liberty people have a right to act as they think proper. By these means
that finer system of morals, which extends virtue and goodness to points
which the mere letter of the law cannot reach, is at once annihilated;
and the peculiar excellence, of the Gospel, as a religion of motives, is
superseded by the licence allowed to rebellious wills, and the darkness
of perverse understandings.
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