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