"Society is, indeed, a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest, may be dissolved at pleasure. But the State ought not to be considered a mere partnership agreement, taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved at the fancy of the parties. It is not a partnership in things subservient to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular state, is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society. The municipal corporations of that universal kingdom are not morally at liberty, at their pleasure, and on their speculations of a contingent improvement, wholly to separate and tear asunder the bands of their subordinate community. It is the first and supreme necessity only,-a necessity which is not chosen, but chooses,-a necessity that admits no discussion, and demands no evidence, which alone can justify a resort to anarchy. But if that which is only submission to necessity, should be made the object of choice, the law is broken, nature is disobeyed, and the rebellious are outlawed, cast forth and exiled from this world of reason, and order, and peace, and virtue, and fruitful penitence, into the antagonist world of madness, discord, vice, confusion, and unavailing sorrow.'

The expenditures allotted by the State to the Church, the assignment of revenues descending by a corporate inheritance, and inalienable for the civil purposes of the commonwealth; the appointment of a separate body of men, inducted by learning and customs of a peculiar order, into the faculty of sustaining the functions of that Church, had all become the objects of popular obloquy and ignorant declamation. Burke defended them by a resistless appeal to human nature. The nation, in the persons of its wise, and learned, and noble, and religious,

who recognise the will of Providence in the formation of states; "cannot," said he, "think it reprehensible that our fealty and homage, 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 public, solemn acts are performed; in buildings, in music, in decoration, in speech, in the dignity of persons, according to the customs of mankind, taught by their nature, that is, with modest splendour, with unassuming state, with mild majesty, and sober pomp. For those purposes, they think that 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 public ornament. It is the public consolation. It nourishes the public hope. The poorest man finds his own importance and dignity in it; while 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. **** It is on some such principles that the majority of the people of England, far from thinking a Religious Establishment unlawful, hardly think it lawful to be without one. * * * * This principle runs through the whole system of their polity. They do not consider their Church Establishment as merely convenient, but as essential to the State; not as a thing heterogeneous and separable. They consider it as the foundation of their whole Constitution. Church and State are ideas inseparable in their minds. **** It is from our attachment to a Church Establishment, that the English nation did not think it wise to intrust that great fundamental interest of the whole, to what they trust no part of their civil or military public service, that is, to the unsteady and precarious contribution of individuals. They go farther. They certainly never have suffered, and never will suf

fer, the fixed estate of the Church to be converted 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 dependant on the Crown. They tremble for the public tranquillity, from the disorders of a factious clergy, if it were made to depend on any other than the Crown. They therefore made their Church, like their King, and their nobility, independent."

Having thus laid the true and rational ground for the possession by the clergy of an income and institutions, which save them from the necessity of choosing between a slavish dependence for bread, or a factious dependence for power; from following the steps of a tyrant on the throne, or from heading the rebellion of the multitude; consequences directly irresistible, in the first change which dislodges them from their holding among the solid interests of the land; a holding, too, ascending higher into antiquity than the proudest title of the nobles or the monarchy-he states the nature of their title. "From the united considerations of religion and constitutional polity, 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 for either use or dominion, but the guardian only, and the regulator. They have ordained that the provision of this establishment should be as stable as the earth on which it stands."

From this simple statement of the fact, he suddenly starts into a singularly beautiful expansion of the natural maxim, that religion is necessary to the highest as well as the

humblest ranks of human beings. "The Christian statesman of this land would indeed first provide for the multitude, because it is the multitude, and is therefore the first in the Ecclesiastical institution, and in all institutions. They have been taught that the circumstance of the Gospel's being preached to the poor, was one of the great tests of its true mission. They think, therefore, that those do not believe it, who do not take care that it should be preached to the poor. But they are not deprived of a due and anxious sensation of pity for the distresses of the miserable great. They are sensible that religious instruction is of more consequence to them than to any others, from the greatness of the temptation to which they are exposed, from the important consequences that attend their faults, from the contagion of their ill example, from the necessity of bowing down the stubborn neck of their pride and ambition to the yoke of moderation and virtue; from a consideration of the fat stupidity and gross ignorance concerning what it most imports men to know, which prevails at courts, and at the head of armies, and in senates, as much as at the loom and in the field.

"The English people are satisfied, that to the great the consolations of religion are as necessary as its instructions. They, too, are among the unhappy. They feel personal pain and domestic sorrow. In those they have no privilege, but are subject to pay their full contingent to the contributions levied on mortality. They want this sovereign balm, under their gnawing cares and anxieties, which being less conversant about the limited wants of animal life, range without limit, and are diversified by infinite combinations in the wild and unbounded regions of imagination. Some charitable dole is wanting to those, our often very unhappy brethren, to fill the gloomy void in minds which have nothing on earth to hope or fear; something to relieve the killing languor and overlaboured lassitude of those who have nothing to do; something to excite an appetite for existence in the palled satiety which attends on all pleasures that may be bought,

where nature is not left to her own process, where even desire is anticipated, and, therefore, enjoyment defeated by meditated schemes and contrivances of delight."

The importance of placing the ministers of religion in some condition of competence, or even of wealth and dignity, with reference to their use as instructors of the higher orders, is now plainly but vigorously reasoned. "The people of England know how little influence the teachers of religion are likely to have with the wealthy and powerful of long standing, and how much less with the newly fortunate, if they appear in a manner no way assorted with those with whom they must associate, and over whom they must even exercise, in some cases, something like an authority. What must they think of that body of teachers, if they see it in no part above the establishment of their domestic servants? If the poverty were voluntary, there might be some difference. Strong instances of self-denial operate powerfully on our minds; and a man who has no wants, has obtained great freedom, and firmness, and even dignity. But, as the mass of any description of men are but men, and their poverty cannot be voluntary, that disrespect which attends on all lay poverty, will not depart from the ecclesiastical. Our provident Constitution has therefore taken care that those who are to instruct presumptuous ignorance, those who are to be censors over insolent vice, should neither incur their contempt, nor live upon their alms. Nor will it tempt the rich to a neglect of the true medicine of their minds. For those reasons, while we provide first, and with a parental solicitude, for the poor, we have not relegated religion, like something that we were ashamed to shew, to obscure municipalities or rustic villages. No; we will have her to exalt her mitred front in Courts and Parliaments! We will have her mixed throughout the whole mass of life, and blended with all the classes of society. The people of England will shew to the haughty potentates of the world, and to their talking sophisters, that a free, a generous, an informed nation, honours the high magistrates of its Church; that it will not suffer the

insolence of wealth and titles, or any other species of proud pretension, to look down with scorn on what they look up to with reverence, nor presume to trample on that acquired personal nobility, which they intend always to be, and which often is, the fruit, not the reward, for what can be the reward, of learning, piety, and virtue? They can see, without pain or grudging, an Archbishop precede a Duke. They can see a Bishop of Durham, or a Bishop of Winchester, in possession of ten thousand pounds a-year; and cannot conceive why it is in worse hands than estates to the like amount in the hands of this Earl or that Squire! though it may be true that so many dogs and horses are not kept by the former, and fed with the victuals that ought to feed the children of the people. It is true, the whole Church revenue is not employed, and to every shilling, in charity, nor perhaps ought it, but something is generally so employed. It is better to cherish virtue and humanity, by leaving much to free-will, even with some loss to the object, than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of a political benevolence. The world, on the whole, will gain by a liberty, without which virtue cannot exist. **** In England, most of us conceive, that it is envy and malignity towards those who are the beginners of their own fortune, and not a love of the selfdenial and mortification of the ancient Church, that makes some look askance at the distinctions, honours, and revenues, which, taken from no person, are set apart for virtue. The ears of the people of England are distinguishing. They hear these men speak broad; their tongue betrays them. Their language is the patois of fraud. With these ideas rooted in their minds, the Commons of Great Britain, in the national emergencies, will never seek their resource from the confiscation of the estates of the Church and the poor. Sacrilege and proscription are not among the ways and means of our Committee of Supply. The Jews in 'Change Alley have not yet dared to hint their hopes of a mortgage on the revenues belonging to the See of Canterbury. I am not afraid that I shall be disavowed, when I assure you, that there

* *

** * * *

* *

persons who were taught a double prejudice in favour of religion, by education, and by the place they hold in the administration of its functions, are to receive the remnants of their property as alms from the profane and impious hands of those who had plundered them of all the rest; -to receive, if they are at all to receive, not from the charitable contributions of the faithful, but from the insolent tenderness of known and avowed Atheism, the maintenance of religion, measured out to them on the standard of the contempt in which it is held, and for the purpose of rendering those who receive the allowance, vile in the eyes of mankind."

There is an admirable observation on the profligate plea, that the confiscation of the Church property was called for by the necessity of keeping faith with the public creditor, a plea which is now loud in the mouth of the mob among ourselves. "The enemies to all property," exclaims Burke, "pretend a most tender, delicate, and scrupulous anxiety for keeping the King's engagements with the public creditor! They should have known, that it is to the property of the citizen, and not to the demands of the creditor of the State, that the original faith of civil society is pledged. The claim of the citizen is prior in time, paramount in title, superior in equity. The fortunes of individuals, whether possessed by acquisition, or by descent, or in virtue of a participation in the goods of some community, are no part of the creditor's security, expressed or implied. They never so much as entered into his head when he made the bargain. He well knew that the public, whether represented by a Monarch or by a Senate, can pledge nothing but the public estate; and it can have no public estate, but in what it derives from a just and proportioned imposition upon the citizens at large. This was engaged, and nothing else could be engaged, to the public creditor. No man can mortgage his injustice as a pawn for his fidelity."

To close this part of the subject, there are but two cases in which the Government can interfere with Church property :-The first, where it is palpably excessive; the second,

where the ecclesiastical body have totally failed of doing their original office, that of preserving and teaching the purity of the Christian religion. Both these cases occurred in England, and fully justified the Reformation, and the change of property from the possession of a Popish to that of a Protestant clergy. The ancient Church of the kingdom had shewn itself no longer fit for an instructor of the people. A new race, who drew their lessons from the Scriptures alone, had extinguished their function, by the superior claims of human reason and Divine truth; and while the degenerate functionaries vacated their office, not by the dictum of the Government, but by the voice of the awakened national piety, the income of that office, by every rule of right, passed over to its worthier possessors. But neither case sanctions the plunder of the Church. The opulence of the Romish Church in England had been consecrated to God by its original donors; it was not for man to reclaim the gift. It might be within his competence to regulate, to direct the course of its expenditure in sacred things, to render it powerful and prolific in the general service of religion. The monastery might be converted into a school of moral and divine teaching; the estate which had nurtured the indolence of nuns and friars, might do the nobler service of raising temples for the honour of Heaven, and the good of its creatures, among the thousand desolate hills and valleys of the land: the cup which had only pampered the indolence or appetite of an effeminate and embroidered priesthood, might be employed to pour out the draught of life among the thirsty lips of ignorance, longing for knowledge, and passion waiting only to be purified. Those would have been glorious employments for the wealth abandoned in the flight of the Romish Church. No nobler trophy could ever have been erected on the field of that illustrious battle. But the evil-genius of England prevailed; the violence of a tyrant, and the peculation of his satraps and satellites, prevailed over the wisdom and the necessities of religion. The Romish opulence was perverted into the means of high-born prodigality. Dukes and Earls seized