individuals.
It is the public ornament. It is the public consolation. It nourishes
the public hope. The poorest man finds his own importance and dignity in
it, whilst the wealth and pride of individuals at every moment makes the
man of humble rank and fortune sensible of his inferiority, and degrades
and vilifies his condition. It is for the man in humble life, and to
raise his nature, and to put him in mind of a state in which the
privileges of opulence will cease, when he will be equal by nature, and
may be more than equal by virtue, that this portion of the general
wealth of his country is employed and sanctified.

I assure you I do not aim at singularity. I give you opinions which have
been accepted amongst us, from very early times to this moment, with a
continued and general approbation, and which, indeed, are so worked into
my mind that I am unable to distinguish what I have learned from others
from the results of my own meditation.

It is on some such principles that the majority of the people of
England, far from thinking a religious national establishment unlawful,
hardly think it lawful to be without one. In France you are wholly
mistaken, if you do not believe us above all other things attached to
it, and beyond all other nations; and when this people has acted
unwisely and unjustifiably in its favor, (as in some instances they have
done, most certainly,) in their very errors you will at least discover
their zeal.

This principle runs through the whole system of their polity. They do
not consider their Church establishment as convenient, but as essential
to their state: not as a thing heterogeneous and separable,--something
added for accommodation,--what they may either keep up or lay aside,
according to their temporary ideas of convenience. They consider it as
the foundation of their whole Constitution, with which, and with every
part of which, it holds an indissoluble union. Church and State are
ideas inseparable in their minds, and scarcely is the one ever mentioned
without mentioning the other.

Our education is so formed as to confirm and fix this impression. Our
education is in a manner wholly in the hands of ecclesiastics, and in
all stages from infancy to manhood. Even when our youth, leaving schools
and universities, enter that most important period of life which begins
to link experience and study together, and when with that view they
visit other countries, instead of old domestics whom we hav