Historical voices

We are Protestants, not from indifference, but from zeal.

Violently condemning neither the Greek nor the Armenian, nor, since heats are subsided, the Roman system of religion, we prefer the Protestant: not because we think it has less of the Christian religion in it, but because, in our judgment…

It will be perfumed with other incense than the infectious stuff which is imported by the smugglers of adulterated metaphysics.

We shall not light up our temple from that unhallowed fire.

If our religious tenets should ever want a further elucidation, we shall not call on Atheism to explain them.

We shall never be such fools as to call in an enemy to the substance of any system to remove its corruptions, to supply its defects, or to perfect its construction.

If it be a plague, it is such a plague that the precautions of the most severe quarantine ought to be established against it.

If it be a panacea, we do not want it: we know the consequences of unnecessary physic.

But when we see the model held up to ourselves, we must feel as Englishmen, and, feeling, we must provide as Englishmen.

We felt for them as men; but we kept aloof from them, because we were not citizens of France.

Let me add, that we are as unwilling to learn these lessons from France as we are sure that we never taught them to that nation.

Their attachment to their country itself is only so far as it agrees with some of their fleeting projects: it begins and ends with that scheme of polity which falls in with their momentary opinion.

They always speak as if they were of opinion that there is a singular species of compact between them and their magistrates, which binds the magistrate, but which has nothing reciprocal in it, but that the majesty of the people has a right…

They think that government may vary like modes of dress, and with as little ill effect; that there needs no principle of attachment, except a sense of present conveniency, to any constitution of the state.

They conceive, very systematically, that all things which give perpetuity are mischievous, and therefore they are at inexpiable war with all establishments.

With them it is a sufficient motive to destroy an old scheme of things, because it is an old one.

They have no respect for the wisdom of others; but they pay it off by a very full measure of confidence in their own.

Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts.

Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved.

Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them.

We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that the stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of…

We preserve the whole of our feelings still native and entire, unsophisticated by pedantry and infidelity.

We have not been drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled, like stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff and rags, and paltry, blurred shreds of paper about the rights of man.

In England we have not yet been completely embowelled of our natural entrails: we still feel within us, and we cherish and cultivate, those inbred sentiments which are the faithful guardians, the active monitors of our duty, the true…