you should be able to name the degrees of severity that will hinder more than promote the progress of religion, and cannot name those degrees that will promote rather than hinder it; that those who would take their measures by you, and follow your scheme, might know how to proceed so, as not to do more harm than good: for since you are so certain, that there are degrees of pu nishments or penalties that will do good, and other de grees of them that will do harm; ought you not to have told us, what that true degree is, or how it may be known, without which all your goodly scheme is of no use? For allowing all you have said to be as true as you would have it, no good can be done without showing the just measure of punishment to be used.

If the degree be too great, it will, you confess, do harm: can one then not err on the other hand, by using too little? If you say so, we are agreed, and I desire no better toleration. If therefore too great will do harm, and too little, in your opinion, will do no good; you ought to tell us the just mean. This I pressed upon you; whereof that the reader may be judge, I shall here trouble him with the repetition:

"There is a third thing, that you are as tender and reserved in, as either naming the criminals to be pu nished, or positively telling us the end for which they should be punished; and that is, with what sort of penalties, what degree of punishment, they should be forced. You are indeed so gracious to them, that you renounce the severities and penalties hitherto made use of. You tell us, they should be but moderate penalties. But if we ask you what are moderate penalties, you confess you cannot tell us: so that by moderate here, you yet mean nothing. You tell us, the outward force to be applied, should be duly tempered. But what that due temper is, you do not, or cannot say; and so, in effect, it signifies just nothing. Yet if in this you are not plain and direct, all the rest of your design will signify nothing. For it being to have some men, and to some end pu nished; yet if it cannot be found what punishment is to be used, it is, notwithstanding all you have said, utterly

useless. You tell us modestly, That to determine precisely the just measure of the punishment, will require some consideration. If the faults were precisely determined, and could be proved, it would require no more consideration to determine the measure of the punishment in this, than it would in any other case, where those were known. But where the fault is undefined, and the guilt not to be proved, as I suppose it will be found in this present business of examining; it will without doubt require consideration to proportion the force to the design: just so much consideration as it will require to fit a coat to the moon, or proportion a shoe to the feet of those who inhabit her. For to proportion a punishment to a fault that you do not name, and so we in charity ought to think you do not yet know, and a fault that when you have named it, it will be impossible to be proved who are or are not guilty of it, will, I suppose, require as much consideration as to fit a shoe to feet whose size and shape are not known.

"However, you offer some measures whereby to regulate your punishments; which, when they are looked into, will be found to be just as good as none, they being impossible to be any rule in the case. The first is, So much force, or such penalties as are ordinarily sufficient to prevail with men of common discretion, and not desperately perverse and obstinate, to weigh matters of religion carefully and impartially, and without which ordinarily they will not do this. Where it is to be observed:

"First, That who are these men of common discretion, is as hard to know, as to know what is a fit degree of punishment in the case; and so you do but regulate one uncertainty by another. Some men will be apt to think, that he who will not weigh matters of religion, which are of infinite concernment to him, without punishment, cannot in reason be thought a man of common discretion. Many women of common discretion enough to manage the ordinary affairs of their families, are not able to read a page in an ordinary author, or to understand and give an account what it means,

when read to them. Many men of common discretion in their callings are not able to judge when an argument is conclusive or no; much less to trace it through

long train of consequences. What penalties shall be sufficient to prevail with such, who upon examination, I fear, will not be found to make the least part of mankind, to examine and weigh matters of religion carefully and impartially? The law allows all to have common discretion, for whom it has not provided guardians or Bedlam. So that, in effect, your men of common discretion, are all men, not judged idiots or madmen: and penalties sufficient to prevail with men of common discretion are penalties sufficient to prevail with all men but idiots and madmen; which what a measure it is to regulate penalties by, let all men of common discretion judge.

"Secondly, You may be pleased to consider, that all men of the same degree of discretion are not apt to be moved by the same degree of penalties. Some are of a more yielding, some of a more stiff temper; and what is sufficient to prevail on one is not half enough to move the other; though both men of common discretion. So that common discretion will be here of no use to determine the measure of punishment: especially, when in the same clause you except men desperately perverse and obstinate; who are as hard to be known, as what you seek, viz. the just proportions of punishments necessary to prevail with men to consider, examine, and weigh matters of religion: wherein if a man tells you he has considered, he has weighed, he has examined, and so goes on in his former course, it is impossible for you ever to know whether he has done his duty, or whether he be desperately perverse and obstinate. So that this exception signifies just nothing.

"There are many things in your use of force and penalties, different from any I ever met with elsewhere. One of them, this clause of yours concerning the measure of punishments, now under consideration, offers me: wherein you proportion your punishments

only to the yielding and corrigible, not to the perverse and obstinate; contrary to the common discretion which has hitherto made laws in other cases, which levels the punishments against refractory offenders, and never spares them because they are obstinate. This however I will not blame as an oversight in you. Your new method, which aims at such impracticable and inconsistent things as laws cannot bear, nor penalties be useful to, forced you to it. The uselessness, absurdity, and unreasonableness of great severities, you had acknowledged in the foregoing paragraphs; dissenters you would have brought to consider by moderate penalties. They lie under them; but whether they have considered or no, for that you cannot tell, they still continue dissenters. What is to be done now? Why, the incurable are to be left to God, as you tell us. Your punishments were not meant to prevail on the desperately perverse and obstinate, as you tell us here. And so, whatever be the success, your punishments are however justified."

The fullness of your answer to my question, "With what punishments?" made you possibly pass by these two or three pages without making any particular reply to any thing I said in them: we will therefore examine that answer of yours, where you tell us, "That having in your answer declared that you take the severities so often mentioned (which either destroy men, or make them miserable) to be utterly unapt and improper (for reasons there given) to bring men to embrace the truth that must save them: but just how far within those bounds that force extends itself, which is really serviceable to that end, you do not presume to determine." To determine how far moderate force reaches, when it is necessary to your business that it should be determined, is not presuming: you might with more reason have called it presuming to talk of moderate penalties, and not to be able to determine what you mean by them; or to promise, as you do, that you will tell plainly and directly, with what punishments; and here to tell us, you do not presume to determine. But you give a

reason for this modesty of yours, in what follows, where you tell me, I have not shown any cause why you should. And yet you may find, in what is above repeated to you, these words," If in this you are not plain and direct, all the rest of your design will signify nothing." But had I failed in showing any cause why you should; and your charity would not enlighten us, unless driven by my reasons; I dare say yet, if I have not shown any cause why you should determine in this point, I can show a cause why you should not. For I will be answerable to you, that you cannot name any degree of punishment, which will not be either so great, as to come among those you condemn, and show what your moderation, what your aversion to persecution is; or else too little to attain those ends for which you propose it. But whatever you tell me, that I have shown no cause why you should determine, I thought it might have passed for a cause why you should determine more particularly, that, as you will find in those pages, I had proved that the measures you offer, whereby to regulate your punishments, are just as good as none.

Your measures in your "argument considered," and which you repeat here again, are in these words: “so much force, or such penalties as are ordinarily sufficient to prevail with men of common discretion, and not desperately perverse, to weigh matters of religion carefully and impartially, and without which ordinarily they will not do this; so much force, or such penalties may fitly and reasonably be used for the promoting true religion in the world, and the salvation of souls. And what just exception this is liable to, you do not understand." Some of the exceptions it is liable to, you might have seen in what I have here again caused to be reprinted, if you had thought them worth your notice. But you go on to tell us here," that when you speak of men of common discretion, and not desperately perverse and obstinate, you think it is plain enough, that by common discretion you exclude not idiots only, and such as we usually call madmen, but likewise the desperately perverse and obstinate, who perhaps may well