The
ears of the people of England are distinguishing. They hear these
men speak broad. Their tongue betrays them. Their language is in the
patois of fraud, in the cant and gibberish of hypocrisy. The people of
England must think so when these praters affect to carry back the
clergy to that primitive, evangelic poverty which, in the spirit,
ought always to exist in them (and in us, too, however we may like
it), but in the thing must be varied when the relation of that body to
the state is altered- when manners, when modes of life, when indeed
the whole order of human affairs has undergone a total revolution.
We shall believe those reformers, then, to be honest enthusiasts, not,
as now we think them, cheats and deceivers, when we see them
throwing their own goods into common and submitting their own
persons to the austere discipline of the early church.
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 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 is not one public man in this kingdom whom you would
wish to quote, no, not one, of any party or description, who does
not reprobate the dishonest, perfidious, and cruel confiscation
which the National Assembly has been compelled to make of that
property which it was their first duty to protect.
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