I know it may be objected to this scheme, and with some shew of reason, that, should the Popish princes abroad pursue the same methods, with regard to their protestant subjects, the Protestant interest in Europe would thereby be considerably weakened:  but as we have no reason to suspect Popish counsels will ever produce so much moderation, I think the objection ought to have but little weight.

A due execution of this scheme will soon produce many converts from Popery; nevertheless, to the end may it be known, when they shall be of the true Church, I have ordered a large parcel of ecclesiastical or Church thermometers to be made, one of which is to be hung up in each parish church, the description and use of which take as follows, in the words of the ingenious Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq.

The[1] Church thermometer, which I am now to treat of, is supposed have been invented in the reign of Henry the Eighth, about the time when that religious prince put some to death for owning the Pope’s supremacy, and others for denying transubstantiation.  I do not find, however, any great use made of this instrument till it fell into the hand of a learned and vigilant priest or minister, (for he frequently wrote himself both the one and the other) who was some time Vicar of Bray.  This gentleman lived in his vicarage to a good old age; and after having seen several successions of his neighbouring clergy either burnt or banished, departed this life with the satisfaction of having never deserted his flock, and died Vicar of Bray.  As this glass was first designed to calculate the different degrees of heat in religion, as it raged in Popery, or as it cooled, and grew temperate in the Reformation, it was marked at several distances, after the manner our ordinary thermometer is to this day, viz. extreme hot sultry hot, very hot, hot, warm, temperate, cold, just freezing, frost, hard frost, great frost, extreme cold.

[Footnote 1:  In the “Tatler” this paragraph is preceded by the following:  “From my own apartment, Sept. 4.—­Having received many letters filled with compliments and acknowledgments for my late useful discovery of the political barometer, I shall here communicate to the publican account of my ecclesiastical thermometer, the latter giving as manifest prognostications of the changes and revolutions in Church, as the former does of those in State, and both of them being absolutely necessary for every prudent subject who is resolved to keep what he has, and get what he can.” [T.S.]]

It is well known, that Torricellius,[2] the inventor of the common weather-glass, made the experiment of a long tube which held thirty-two foot of water; and that a more modern virtuoso finding such a machine altogether unwieldly and useless, and considering that thirty-two inches of quicksilver weighed as much as so many foot of water in a tube of the same circumference, invented that sizeable instrument which is now in