Note 70 — BOOK VIII.

In religion, as in every thing else, what may be right in the abstract, may be essentially wrong in its practical application. The power of the magistrate to enforce attendance upon divine worship may he very plausibly defended as a principle, but, supposing that the whole Episcopalians in Scotland had been as godly men, and as excellent preachers as Archbishop Leighton, to have obliged these conscientious sufferers to have attended their ministrations, would have been no less persecution than forcing them to attend the worthless curates who neither understood nor preached the gospel.