e seen as
governors to principal men from other parts, three fourths of those who
go abroad with our young nobility and gentlemen are ecclesiastics: not
as austere masters, nor as mere followers; but as friends and companions
of a graver character, and not seldom persons as well born as
themselves. With them, as relations, they most commonly keep up a close
connection through life. By this connection we conceive that we attach
our gentlemen to the Church; and we liberalize the Church by an
intercourse with the leading characters of the country.

So tenacious are we of the old ecclesiastical modes and fashions of
institution, that very little alteration has been made in them since the
fourteenth or fifteenth century: adhering in this particular, as in all
things else, to our old settled maxim, never entirely nor at once to
depart from antiquity. We found these old institutions, on the whole,
favorable to morality and discipline; and we thought they were
susceptible of amendment, without altering the ground. We thought that
they were capable of receiving and meliorating, and above all of
preserving, the accessions of science and literature, as the order of
Providence should successively produce them. And after all, with this
Gothic and monkish education, (for such it is in the groundwork,) we may
put in our claim to as ample and as early a share in all the
improvements in science, in arts, and in literature, which have
illuminated and adorned the modern world, as any other nation in Europe:
we think one main cause of this improvement was our not despising the
patrimony of knowledge which was left us by our forefathers.

It is from our attachment to a Church establishment, that the English
nation did not think it wise to intrust that great fundamental interest
of the whole to what they trust no part of their civil or military
public service,--that is, to the unsteady and precarious contribution of
individuals. They go further. They certainly never have suffered, and
never will suffer, the fixed estate of the Church to be converted into a
pension, to depend on the Treasury, and to be delayed, withheld, or
perhaps to be extinguished by fiscal difficulties: which difficulties
may sometimes be pretended for political purposes, and are in fact often
brought on by the extravagance, negligence, and rapacity of politicians.
The people of England think that they have constitutional motives, as
well as religious, against any projec