Your noblesse did not deserve
punishment; but to degrade is to punish.
IT WAS WITH THE SAME SATISFACTION I found that the result of my
inquiry concerning your clergy was not dissimilar. It is no soothing
news to my ears that great bodies of men are incurably corrupt. It
is not with much credulity I listen to any when they speak evil of
those whom they are going to plunder. I rather suspect that vices
are feigned or exaggerated when profit is looked for in their
punishment. An enemy is a bad witness; a robber is a worse. Vices
and abuses there were undoubtedly in that order, and must be. It was
an old establishment, and not frequently revised. But I saw no
crimes in the individuals that merited confiscation of their
substance, nor those cruel insults and degradations, and that
unnatural persecution which have been substituted in the place of
meliorating regulation.
If there had been any just cause for this new religious
persecution, the atheistic libellers, who act as trumpeters to animate
the populace to plunder, do not love anybody so much as not to dwell
with complacency on the vices of the existing clergy. This they have
not done. They find themselves obliged to rake into the histories of
former ages (which they have ransacked with a malignant and profligate
industry) for every instance of oppression and persecution which has
been made by that body or in its favor in order to justify, upon
very iniquitous, because very illogical, principles of retaliation,
their own persecutions and their own cruelties.
Pages:
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221