persecuting. Nor should we have accused her government of
persecution for passing any law, however severe, against overt
acts of sedition. But to argue that, because a man is a Catholic,
he must think it right to murder a heretical sovereign, and that
because he thinks it right, he will attempt to do it, and then,
to found on this conclusion a law for punishing him as if he had
done it, is plain persecution.

If, indeed, all men reasoned in the same manner on the same data,
and always did what they thought it their duty to do, this mode
of dispensing punishment might be extremely judicious. But as
people who agree about premises often disagree about conclusions,
and as no man in the world acts up to his own standard of right,
there are two enormous gaps in the logic by which alone penalties
for opinions can be defended. The doctrine of reprobation, in the
judgment of many very able men, follows by syllogistic necessity
from the doctrine of election. Others conceive that the
Antinomian heresy directly follows from the doctrine of
reprobation; and it is very generally thought that licentiousness
and cruelty of the worst description are likely to be the fruits,
as they often have been the fruits, of Antinomian opinions. This
chain of reasoning, we think, is as perfect in all its parts as
that which makes out a Papist to be necessarily a traitor. Yet it
would be rather a strong measure to hang all the Calvinists, on
the ground that if they were spared, they would infallibly commit
all the atrocities of Matthias and Knipperdoling. For, reason the
matter as we may, experience shows us that a man may believe in
election without believing in reprobation, that he may believe in
reprobation without being an Antinomian, and that he may be an
Antinomian without being a bad citizen. Man, in short, is so