e crime and the punishment stand
upon their own bottom. But now we ought all of us, clergymen most
particularly, to avoid assigning another cause of quarrel, in order to
infuse a new source of bitterness into a dispute which personal feelings
on both sides will of themselves make bitter enough, and thereby involve
in it by religious descriptions men who have individually no share
whatsoever in those irregular acts. Let us not make the malignant
fictions of our own imaginations, heated with factious controversies,
reasons for keeping men that are neither guilty nor justly suspected of
crime in a servitude equally dishonorable and unsafe to religion and to
the state. When men are constantly accused, but know themselves not to
be guilty, they must naturally abhor their accusers. There is no
character, when malignantly taken up and deliberately pursued, which
more naturally excites indignation and abhorrence in mankind, especially
in that part of mankind which suffers from it.

I do not pretend to take pride in an extravagant attachment to any sect.
Some gentlemen in Ireland affect that sort of glory. It is to their
taste. Their piety, I take it for granted, justifies the fervor of their
zeal, and may palliate the excess of it. Being myself no more than a
common layman, commonly informed in controversies, leading only a very
common life, and having only a common citizen's interest in the Church
or in the State, yet to you I will say, in justice to my own sentiments,
that not one of those zealots for a Protestant interest wishes more
sincerely than I do, perhaps not half so sincerely, for the support of
the Established Church in both these kingdoms. It is a great link
towards holding fast the connection of religion with the State, and for
keeping these two islands, in their present critical independence of
constitution, in a close connection of _opinion and affection_. I wish
it well, as the religion of the greater number of the primary
land-proprietors of the kingdom, with whom all establishments of Church
and Stats, for strong political reasons, ought in my opinion to be
firmly connected. I wish it well, because it is more closely combined
than any other of the church systems with the _crown_, which is the stay
of the mixed Constitution,--because it is, as things now stand, the sole
connecting _political_ principle between the constitutions of the two
independent kingdoms. I have another and infinitely a stronger reason
fo