If the Church be, as Mr. Locke defines it, a voluntary society, &c, then it is essential to this voluntary society to exclude from her voluntary society any member she thinks fit, or to oppose the entrance of any upon such conditions as she thinks proper.  For, otherwise, it would be a voluntary society acting contrary to her will, which is a contradiction in terms.  And this is Mr. Locke’s opinion, the advocate for the largest scheme of ecclesiastical and civil toleration to Protestants (for to Papists he allows no toleration at all).

They dispute only the extent of the subscription; they therefore tacitly admit the equity of the principle itself.  Here they do not resort to the original rights of Nature, because it is manifest that those rights give as large a power of controverting every part of Scripture, or even the authority of the whole, as they do to the controverting any articles whatsoever.  When a man requires you to sign an assent to Scripture, he requires you to assent to a doctrine as contrary to your natural understanding, and to your rights of free inquiry, as those who require your conformity to any one article whatsoever.

The subscription to Scripture is the most astonishing idea I ever heard, and will amount to just nothing at all.  Gentlemen so acute have not, that I have heard, ever thought of answering a plain, obvious question:  What is that Scripture to which they are content to subscribe?  They do not think that a book becomes of divine authority because it is bound in blue morocco, and is printed by John Baskett and his assigns.  The Bible is a vast collection of different treatises:  a man who holds the divine authority of one may consider the other as merely human.  What is his Canon?  The Jewish?  St. Jerome’s? that of the Thirty-Nine Articles?  Luther’s?  There are some who reject the Canticles; others, six of the Epistles; the Apocalypse has been suspected even as heretical, and was doubted of for many ages, and by many great men.  As these narrow the Canon, others have enlarged it by admitting St. Barnabas’s Epistles, the Apostolic Constitutions, to say nothing of many other Gospels.  Therefore, to ascertain.  Scripture, you must have one article more; and you must define what that Scripture is which, you mean to teach.  There are, I believe, very few who, when Scripture is so ascertained, do not see the absolute necessity of knowing what general doctrine a man draws from it, before he is sent down authorized by the state to teach, it as pure doctrine, and receive a tenth of the produce of our lands.