Our education is so formed as to confirm and fix this
impression. Our education is in a manner wholly in the hands of
ecclesiastics, 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
domestics 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 ecclesiastics, 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 constantly keep 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 fifteenth 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, favorable to morality and discipline, and we thought they
were susceptible of amendment without altering the ground.
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