nature and common relation of men.

Persuaded

that all things ought to be done with reference, and referring all to the point of reference to which all should be directed, they think themselves bound, not only as individuals in the sanctuary of the heart, or as congregated in that personal capacity, to renew the memory of their high origin and cast; but also, in their corporate character, to perform their national homage to the institutor, and author and protector of civil society; without which civil society man could not, by any possibility, arrive at the perfection of which his nature is capable, nor even make a remote and faint approach to it. They conceive that He, who gave our nature to be perfected by our virtue, willed also the necessary means of its perfection— He willed therefore the state-He willed its connection with the source and original archetype of all perfection. They who are convinced of this his will, which is the law of laws and the sovereign of, sovereigns, cannot think it reprehensible that this our corporate fealty and homage, that this our recognition of a signiory paramount, I had almost said this oblation of the state itself, as a worthy offering on the high altar of universal praise, should be performed as all publick solemn acts are performed, in buildings, in musick, in decoration, in speech, in the dignity of persons, according to the customs of mankind, taught by their nature; that is, with modest splendor, with unassuming state, with mild majesty and sober pomp. For those purposes, they think, some part of the wealth of the country is as usefully employed as it can be, in fomenting the luxury of

individuals. It is the publick ornament. It is the publick consolation. It nourishes the publick hope. The poorest man finds his own importance and dig. nity in it, whilst the wealth and pride of individuals, at every moment, makes the man of humble rank and fortune sensible of his inferiority, and degrades and vilifies his condition. It is for the man in humble life, and to raise his nature, and to put him in mind of a state in which the privileges of opulence will cease, when he will be equal by nature, and may be more than equal by virtue, that this portion of the general wealth of his country is employed and sanctified.

I do not aim at singularity. I give opinions, which have been accepted amongst us, from very early times to this moment, with a continued and general approbation, and which indeed are so worked into my mind, that I am unable to distinguish what I have learned from others, from the results of my own meditation.

It is on some such principles that the majority of the people of England, far from thinking a religious national establishment unlawful, hardly think it lawful to be without one. In France you are wholly mistaken if you do not believe us, above all other things, attached to it, and beyond all other nations; and when this people has acted unwisely and unjustifiably in its favour, as in some instances they have done most certainly, in their very errors you will at least discover their zeal.

This principle runs through the whole system of their polity. They do not consider their church esta

blishment as convenient, but as essential to their state; not as a thing heterogeneous and separable; something added for accommodation; what they may either keep up or lay aside, according to their temporary ideas of convenience. They consider it as the foundation of their whole constitution, with which, and with every part of which, it holds an indissoluble union. Church and State are ideas inseparable in their minds, and scarcely is the one ever mentioned without mentioning the other.

Our education is so formed as to confirm and fix this impression. Our education is, in a manner, wholly in the hands of ecclesiasticks, and in all stages from infancy to manhood. Even when our youth, leaving schools and universities, enter that most important period of life, which begins to link experience and study together, and when, with that view, they visit other countries, instead of old domesticks, whom we have seen as governors to principal men from other parts, three-fourths of those who go abroad, with our young nobility and gentlemen, are ecclesiasticks; not as austere masters, nor as mere followers; but as friends and companions of a graver character, and, not seldom, persons as well born as themselves. With them, as relations, they most commonly keep up a close connection through life. By this connection we conceive that we attach our gentlemen to the church; and we liberalize the church by an intercourse with the leading characters of the country.

So tenacious are we of the old ecclesiastical modes and fashions of institution, that very little alteration

has been made in them since the fourteenth or fif teenth century; adhering in this particular, as in all things else, to our old settled maxim, never entirely, nor at once, to depart from antiquity. We found these old institutions, on the whole, favourable to morality and discipline; and we thought they were susceptible of amendment, without altering the ground. We thought that they were capable of receiving and meliorating, and above all of preserving, the accessions of science and literature, as the order of Providence should successively produce them. And, after all, with this gothick and monkish education, for such it is in the ground work, we may put in our claim to as ample and as early a share in all the improvements in science, in arts, and in literature, which have illuminated and adorned the modern world, as any other nation in Europe; we think one main cause of this improvement was our not despising the patrimony of knowledge which was left us by our forefathers.

It is from our attachment to a church establish"ment, that the English nation did not think it wise to entrust that great fundamental interest of the whole, to what they trust no part of their civil or military publick service, that is, to the unsteady and precarious contribution of individuals. They go further. They certainly never have suffered and never will suffer the fixed estate of the Church to be controverted into a pension, to depend on the treasury, and to be delayed, withheld, or perhaps to be extinguished by fiscal difficulties; which difficulties may sometimes be pretended for political purposes, and

are in fact often brought on by the extravagance, negligence, and rapacity of politicians. The people of England think that they have constitutional motives, as well as religious, against any project of turning their independent clergy into ecclesiastical pensioners of state. They tremble for their liberty, from the influence of a clergy dependent on the crown; they tremble for the publick tranquillity, from the disorders of a factious clergy, if it were made to depend upon any other than the crown. They therefore made their church, like their king and their nobility, independent.

From the united considerations of religion and constitutional policy, from their opinion of a duty to make a sure provision for the consolation of the feeble and the instruction of the ignorant, they have incorporated and identified the estate of the church, with the mass of private property, of which the state is not the proprietor, either for use or dominion, but the guardian only and the regulator. They have ordained that the provision of this establishment might be as stable as the earth on which it stands, and should not fluctuate with the Euripus of funds and actions.

The men of England, the men, I mean, of light and leading in England, whose wisdom, if they have any, is open and direct, would be ashamed, as of a silly deceitful trick, to profess any religion in name, which, by their proceedings, they appear to contemn. If, by their conduct, the only language that rarely lies, they seemed to regard the great ruling principle of the moral and the natural world, as a mere inven