NUMBER XXXIII.
THURSDAY, MARCH 22, 1710-11.
THE apologies of the ancient fathers are reckoned to have been the most useful parts of their writings, and to have done greatest service to the Christian religion; because they removed those misrepresentations which had done it most injury. The methods these writers took, were, openly and freely to discover every point of their faith, to detect the falsehood of their accusers, and to charge nothing upon their adversaries, but what they were sure to make good. This example has been ill followed of later times: the papists, since the Reformation, using all arts to palliate the absurdities of their tenets, and loading the reformers with a thousand calumnies; the consequence of which has been only a more various, wide, and inveterate separation. It is the same thing in civil schisms: a whig forms an image of a tory, just after the thing he most abhors, and that image serves to represent the whole body.
I am not sensible of any material difference there is between those who call themselves the old whigs, and a great majority of the present tories; at least by all I could ever find from examining several per-
