I assure you I do not aim at singularity. I give you opinions
which have been accepted amongst us, from very early times to this
moment, with a continued and general approbation, and which indeed are
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 favor (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 establishment as convenient, but as
essential to their state, not as a thing heterogeneous and
separable, something added for accommodation, what they may either
keep 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.
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