First, I beg leave to speak of our church establishment, which
is the first of our prejudices, not a prejudice destitute of reason,
but involving in it profound and extensive wisdom. I speak of it
first. It is first and last and midst in our minds. For, taking ground
on that religious system of which we are now in possession, we
continue to act on the early received and uniformly continued sense of
mankind. That sense not only, like a wise architect, hath built up the
august fabric of states, but, like a provident proprietor, to preserve
the structure from profanation and ruin, as a sacred temple purged
from all the impurities of fraud and violence and injustice and
tyranny, hath solemnly and forever consecrated the commonwealth and
all that officiate in it. This consecration is made that all who
administer the government of men, in which they stand in the person of
God himself, should have high and worthy notions of their function and
destination, that their hope should be full of immortality, that
they should not look to the paltry pelf of the moment nor to the
temporary and transient praise of the vulgar, but to a solid,
permanent existence in the permanent part of their nature, and to a
permanent fame and glory in the example they leave as a rich
inheritance to the world.
Such sublime principles ought to be infused into persons of
exalted situations, and religious establishments provided that may
continually revive and enforce them.
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