‘To prevent the printing and publishing of seditious or treasonable books against the government, and scandalous pamphlets tending to vice and immorality, is the wisdom of all good governments, and must be the desire of all good men.
‘But to limit religious books to a license, where the tolerated persuasions are many, they conceive, seems altogether unsafe to all, but that whose opinion the licenser is of, who by this bill hath power to allow what he shall judge sound and orthodox, or reject what he shall construe to be either heretical, seditious, or offensive.
‘History and experience have taught how the obscure term of heresy hath been turned and stretched against primitive Christian martyrs, and famous reformers: nor is it forgotten for what reason the writ De Hæretico Comburendo was abolished.
‘It is no strange thing to have learned men of the same church interfere in their opinions concerning several texts of holy scripture; and it is uncertain when their opinions come to the licenser, whether the world shall have the best or no.
‘The different apprehensions men have of divers parts of Scripture, gives birth to different persuasions, who yet all make the Scripture the test thereof; which by the kindness of the government being tolerated, they conceive they ought to be left free to defend them from the misrepresentations, prejudice, or mistake of others, without being subjected to the censure of a licenser of a different persuasion.
‘They therefore humbly hope that nothing may be enacted that will lessen the toleration, which they thankfully enjoy under the favour of this, as well as the late government.’
These considerations, with what others were offered, were of such effect, that the bill dropped.
About this time the writings of Antonia Bourignon were not only translated into English, but also published in print at London. This displeased many of the clergy, and an author was employed to write against them, but chiefly against the Quakers. He called his book, ‘The Snake in the Grass;’ but his own name he concealed; though it was discovered afterwards that he was a suppressed parson, who had refused the oath of allegiance to king William. This man, to render the Quakers odious, had picked up and collected many things from their writings; but he had so mutilated their expressions, by omitting several words that went before, or followed, and by skipping over some in the midst of the period, that they made out quite another sense than the authors had given. To this he added relations of several things that happened, as he said, among the Quakers. Whereas, some of these were fictitious, and mere untruths; he also raked up things that never had been approved by the Quakers, as the case of James Nayler, described here before in its due place; notwithstanding the said James Nayler had publicly given eminent tokens of true repentance.
Among the author’s untruths, this was one, that the Quakers in their schools did not suffer the children to read the holy Scriptures. The falseness of which was made to appear very evidently by a certificate of the French usher of one of their schools at Wandsworth, near London, who himself was no Quaker; as also by the testimonies of some of the neighbours that were people of note; and declared that the bible was daily read by the scholars in the said school, beginning with Genesis, and going on to the end of the Revelations: and then from Genesis again. The false citations of the aforesaid author, were also clearly set forth: for if any would be so malicious, it might by his method be insinuated from Psal. xiv. 1. and Psal. liii. 1. that in the holy Scriptures was said, ‘There is no God;’ because these words are indeed found there. But who would be so desperate as to draw such a conclusion from thence, unless he were an atheist, who openly made a mock of what is sacred. The answerers of this poisonous book, ‘The Snake in the Grass,’ were George Whitehead and Joseph Wyeth; this being a work which required more toil and labour than art, to review all those manifold citations from many authors, and to show the unfairness and disingenuity of the Snake. Now since many were very ready to take for true the falsities in that book, and also in the pamphlets of the apostate Francis Bugg, who was gone over to the church of England, at the request of John Crook, who was still alive, though above eighty years of age, a book of his was reprinted, first published in the year 1663, and so five and thirty years before, the title of which was, ‘Truth’s Principles concerning the Man Christ, his Suffering, Death, Resurrection, Faith in his Blood, the Imputation of his Righteousness,’ &c. By this it appeared that the sentiments of the Quakers concerning these points were not only orthodox now, but that they had been so in those early days.