These energies always existed in nature, and they
were always discernible. They seemed, some of them unserviceable, some
noxious, some no better than a sport to children, until
contemplative ability, combining with practic skill, tamed their
wild nature, subdued them to use, and rendered them at once the most
powerful and the most tractable agents in subservience to the great
views and designs of men. Did fifty thousand persons whose mental
and whose bodily labor you might direct, and so many hundred
thousand a year of a revenue which was neither lazy nor superstitious,
appear too big for your abilities to wield? Had you no way of using
them but by converting monks into pensioners? Had you no way of
turning the revenue to account but through the improvident resource of
a spendthrift sale? If you were thus destitute of mental funds, the
proceeding is in its natural course. Your politicians do not
understand their trade; and therefore they sell their tools.
But the institutions savor of superstition in their very
principle, and they nourish it by a permanent and standing
influence. This I do not mean to dispute, but this ought not to hinder
you from deriving from superstition itself any resources which may
thence be furnished for the public advantage. You derive benefits from
many dispositions and many passions of the human mind which are of
as doubtful a color, in the moral eye, as superstition itself.
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