If they should find the State stick to the Church, the question is, whether they love the constitution in State so well as that they would not destroy the constitution of the State in order to destroy that of the Church.
Burke questions whether those who oppose the Church would sacrifice the State's constitution to achieve their goals.
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More from Edmund Burke
The ceremony of cashiering kings, of which these gentlemen talk so much at their ease, can rarely, if ever, be performed without force.
Who could conceive that men who are habitually meddling, daring, subtle, active, of litigious dispositions and unquiet minds, would easily fall back into their old condition of obscure contention, and laborious, low, and unprofitable…
But supposing they had ranked as they ought to do, and as with us they do actually, the sides of sick-beds are not the academies for forming statesmen and legislators.
Who could doubt but that, at any expense to the state, of which they understood nothing, they must pursue their private interests, which they understood but too well?
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