Jonathan Swift wrote in "An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity in England" (1708):
***** I hope no reader imagines me so weak to stand up in the defence of real Christianity, such as used in primitive times, (if we may believe the authors of those ages,) to have an influence upon men's belief and actions: to offer at the restoring of that would indeed be a wild project....
Therefore I think this caution was in itself altogether unnecessary, (which I have inserted only to prevent all possibility of cavilling,) since every candid reader will easily understand my discourse to be intended only in defence of nominal Christianity; the other having been for some time wholly laid aside by general consent, as utterly inconsistent with our present schemes of wealth and power.
But why we should therefore cast off the name and title of Christians, although the general opinion and resolution be so violent for it, I confess I cannot (with submission) apprehend, nor is the consequence necessary....
...Great wits love to be free with the highest objects; and if they cannot be allowed a God to revile or renounce, they will speak evil of dignities, abuse the government, and reflect upon the ministry; which I am sure few will deny to be of much more pernicious consequences....
...It must be allowed indeed that, to break an English free-born officer only for blasphemy was, to speak the gentlest of such an action, a very high strain of absolute power....But if he argued, as some have done, upon a mistaken principle, that an officer who is guilty of speaking blasphemy may some time or other proceed so far as to raise a mutiny, the consequence is by no means to be admitted; for surely the commander of an English army is likely to be but ill obeyed whose soldiers fear and reverence him as little as they do a Deity.... *****
It's interesting that Swift's irony undercuts his own avowed and steadfast support for the Test Act in his real life. His irony allows no common position on Christianity and religion -- Anglicans, Dissenters, Catholics, (otherwise conformist) "freethinkers," et al. -- to escape unscathed. Only a certain historically qualified respect for primitive Christianity (though any effort to restore it now would be impossible and reactionary) and an attack upon "our present schemes of wealth and power" remain to speak to us. Yoshie