es. Divine morality! which could have
flowed only from a divine source! Divine legislation! dictated by God
himself! It is unfortunate, that the nature of man will not permit the
spirit, and even the outward forms, of a religion so adapted to the actual
condition of the human species to be universal; and, that the different
views taken of the text, by the variance of the human understanding, should
diverge into incongruous systems, and excite religious dissentions. But,
however this may be deplored, it is still more deplorable, that it should
ever enter into the mind of man to establish systems of education, in which
that which should be the foundation of it is totally excluded from it; that
the end of knowledge should be separated {247} from the means of it; that
the rudiments of instruction should be devoted solely to the acquisition of
worldly arts, of which the operation is to be left to the direction of
ignorance and selfishness. It is astonishing, with the experience men have
so lately and so dearly gained, that there can be found one to approve of a
system, in this country, the archetype of which has desolated Europe and
ruined France. In attributing the explosion of the French revolution to the
deistical and atheistical philosophers, I do not hesitate to attribute the
long continuation of it to the change that took place in the forms of
education; to the universities of Buonaparte[93], to the confining of men's
interests to {248} the duration of life. In this country, there is a system
in full operation, and patronized by some of the first characters of the
state, by which a very large portion of the people will, in a few years,
consist of persons able to read, write, and keep accounts, who will have no
knowledge, or an erroneous one, of the duties and sanctions of religion,
and whose morality will consequently be dependent on their reasoning
faculties; and I am very much mistaken if those faculties will not lead to
similar conceptions and similar effects as those produced by the reasoning
faculties of 1788 and 1789. This opinion cannot be mistaken for one of
intolerance. I think it would have been happier had the whole nation been
of one accord in every point of religion; and I see, in the church of
England, sufficient inducements to have restrained minds, sensible of the
danger of innovation, from making a few points of mysterious doctrines a
plea for separating from her; but while I say this, I am far from thinki