ey were born, I never can believe to be politic
or expedient, much less necessary for the existence of any state or
church in the world. Whenever I shall be convinced, which will be late
and reluctantly, that the safety of the Church is utterly inconsistent
with all the civil rights whatsoever of the far larger part of the
inhabitants of our country, I shall be extremely sorry for it; because I
shall think the Church to be truly in danger. It is putting things into
the position of an ugly alternative, into which I hope in God they never
will be put.

I have said most of what occurs to me on the topics you touch upon,
relative to the religion of the king, and his coronation oath. I shall
conclude the observations which I wished to submit to you on this point
by assuring you that I think you the most remote that can be conceived
from the metaphysicians of our times, who are the most foolish of men,
and who, dealing in universals and essences, see no difference between
more and less,--and who of course would think that the reason of the law
which obliged the king to be a communicant of the Church of England
would be as valid to exclude a Catholic from being an exciseman, or to
deprive a man who has five hundred a year, under that description, from
voting on a par with a factitious Protestant Dissenting freeholder of
forty shillings.

Recollect, my dear friend, that it was a fundamental principle in the
French monarchy, whilst it stood, that the state should be Catholic; yet
the Edict of Nantes gave, not a full ecclesiastical, but a complete
civil _establishment_, with places of which only they were capable, to
the Calvinists of France,--and there were very few employments, indeed,
of which they were not capable. The world praised the Cardinal de
Richelieu, who took the first opportunity to strip them of their
fortified places and cautionary towns. The same world held and does hold
in execration (so far as that business is concerned) the memory of Louis
the Fourteenth, for the total repeal of that favorable edict; though the
talk of "fundamental laws, established religion, religion of the prince,
safety to the state," &c., &c., was then as largely held, and with as
bitter a revival of the animosities of the civil confusions during the
struggles between the parties, as now they can be in Ireland.

Perhaps there are persons who think that the same reason does not hold,
when the religious relation of the sovereign and subjec