offer the best terms: this corrupt practice was suffered

in the days of Hen. VIII. when the clergy losing ground, the statute 21 Hen. VIII. was enacted, bearing, "That in case any person die intestate, or the executors refuse to prove the testament, the Ordinary shall grant administration to the widow, or to the next of kin, or to both, taking surety for true administration."
This statute, as it points out the particular persons who are intitled to letters of administration, without leaving any choice to the Ordinary, was certainly intended to cut him out of all hope of making gain of the effects of persons dying intestate. But the church does not easily quit its hold. Means were fallen upon to elude this law also. Though the possession given by this statute was wrested out of the hands of the Ordinary, yet his pretensions subsisted intire, of calling the administrator to account, and obliging him or her to distribute the effects to pious uses. This was an admirable engine in the hands of a churchman for squeezing money. An administrator who gave any considerable share to the Bishop, to be laid out by him, without doubt, in pious uses, would not find much difficulty in making his accompt. This rank abuse moved the judges solemnly to resolve, that the Ordinary, after administration granted by him, cannot compel the administrator to make distribution*. And at last, the right

of the next of kin was fully established by statute 22 and 23 Car. II. cap. 10. This. cuts out the Ordinary intirely.
*If I thought the Athanasian creed was a part of the religion of Jesus, I should be induced to entertain a hard thought of Christianity. I should think it enjoined a slavish submission to the dictates of designing men; and instead of a reasonable service, required us to renounce our understandings, to apostatize from humanity, and degenerate into brutes, by giving up our reason, which alone distinguishes us from them. Most unjust charge upon our holy religion! A religion, which enlarges our rational faculties, filling the mind with an astonishing idea of an eternal duration, and thereby giving us a contempt of the mean, transient pleasures of this life, and which we and the brutes enjoy in common: A religion that requires only the highest degree of reverence towards the MOST HIGH, the most refined purity of heart and mind, and the most noble and diffusive charity towards all mankind: In short, that establishes righteousness upon earth, and intire obedience to the will of God; that so having put the oyl into our lamp