at. Religion, therefore, is not believed because the
laws have established it, but it is established because the leading part
of the community have previously believed it to be true. As no water can
rise higher than its spring, no establishment can have more authority
than it derives from its principle; and the power of the government can
with no appearance of reason go further coercively than to bind and hold
down those who have once consented to their opinions. The consent is the
origin of the whole. If they attempt to proceed further, they disown the
foundation upon which their own establishment was built, and they claim
a religious assent upon mere human authority, which has been just now
shown to be absurd and preposterous, and which they in fact confess to
be so.

However, we are warranted to go thus far. The people often actually do
(and perhaps they cannot in general do better) take their religion, not
on the coercive, which is impossible, but on the influencing authority
of their governors, as wise and informed men. But if they once take a
religion on the word of the state, they cannot in common sense do so a
second time, unless they have some concurrent reason for it. The
prejudice in favor of your wisdom is shook by your change. You confess
that you have been wrong, and yet you would pretend to dictate by your
sole authority; whereas you disengage the mind by embarrassing it. For
why should I prefer your opinion of to-day to your persuasion of
yesterday? If we must resort to prepossessions for the ground of
opinion, it is in the nature of man rather to defer to the wisdom of
times past, whose weakness is not before his eyes, than to the present,
of whose imbecility he has daily experience. Veneration of antiquity is
congenial to the human, mind. When, therefore, an establishment would
persecute an opinion in possession, it sets against it all the powerful
prejudices of human nature. It even sets its own authority, when it is
of most weight, against itself in that very circumstance in which it
must necessarily have the least; and it opposes the stable prejudice of
time against a new opinion founded on mutability: a consideration that
must render compulsion in such a case the more grievous, as there is no
security, that, when the mind is settled in the new opinion, it may not
be obliged to give place to one that is still newer, or even, to a
return of the old. But when an ancient establishment begins early to
p