The error will be more striking in the following passages.
"If an atheist would well consider the arguments in this book, he would confess there was a God."
There was a God! And why not confess that there is a God? The writer did not consider that the first part of the sentence is conditional, and that the last ought to be declaratory of a fact always existing.
"Two young men have made a discovery that there was a God."——Swift's Arg. against Abolishing Christianity.
A curious discovery indeed! Were the Dean still alive, he might find there is a great inaccuracy in that passage of his works.
"Yet were we to use the same word, where the figure was manifest, we should use the preposition from."——Priestley, Gram. p. 158.
Here is the same error, and the author may live to correct it.
But of all this class of mistakes, the following is the most palpable.
"I am determined to live, as if there was a future life."——Hammon, quoted by Price and Priestley.