Edmund Burke

The spirit of religious controversy has slackened by the nature of things: by act you may revive it.

Nor can you content other men's conscience, real or pretended, by any concessions: follow your own; seek peace and ensue it.

Two thousand (or some great number) of clergy resigned their livings in one day rather than read it: and truly, rather than raise that second idol, I should have adhered to the Directory, as I now adhere to the Common Prayer.

Dissent, not satisfied with toleration, is not conscience, but ambition.

If you make this a season for religious alterations, depend upon it, you will soon find it a season of religious tumults and religious wars.

If this be the case in the present instance, certainly you ought to make the alteration that is proposed, to satisfy your own consciences, and to give content to your people.

But the ground for a legislative alteration of a legal establishment is this, and this only,--that you find the inclinations of the majority of the people, concurring with your own sense of the intolerable nature of the abuse, are in favor…

But it is not human frailty and imperfection, and even a considerable degree of them, that becomes a ground for your alteration; for by no alteration will you get rid of those errors, however you may delight yourselves in varying to…

If these gentlemen complained justly of any compulsion upon them on that article, I would hardly wait for their petitions; as soon as I knew the evil, I would haste to the cure; I would even run before their complaints.

If ever there was anything to which, from reason, nature, habit, and principle, I am totally averse, it is persecution for conscientious difference in opinion.

In the reign of Charles the First a violent and ill-considered attempt was made unjustly to establish the platform of the government and the rites of the Church of England in Scotland, contrary to the genius and desires of far the majority…

History shows us what it meant, and all that it could mean with any degree of common sense.

Speaker, would forever put the Church out of its own power; it certainly would put it far above the State, and erect it into that species of independency which it has been the great principle of our policy to prevent.

She would limit her corporate powers, on the contrary, and she would oppose her fundamental principles, if she were to deny herself the prudential exercise of such capacity of reformation.

As an independent church, professing fallibility, she has claimed a right of acting without the consent of any other; as a church, she claims, and has always exercised, a right of reforming whatever appeared amiss in her doctrine, her…

The Church, like every body corporate, may alter her laws without changing her identity.

This is but common justice, which they and all mankind have a right to.

If they have once destroyed, more than once they have saved them.

Let him recollect, along with the injuries, the services which Dissenters have done to our Church and to our State.

But if we must be driven, whether we will or not, to recollect these unhappy transactions, let our memory be complete and equitable, let us recollect the whole of them together.

It is as true, that, from the same selfish motives, those who are struggling upwards are apt to find everything wrong and out of order.

It is hard to persuade them that there can be anything amiss in establishments which by feeling experience they find to be so very comfortable.

We all know that those who loll at their ease in high dignities, whether of the Church or of the State, are commonly averse to all reformation.

In particular, I do most exceedingly condemn all such arguments as involve any kind of reflection on the personal character of the gentlemen who have brought in a petition so decent in the style of it, and so constitutional in the mode.

Poor souls, they are to be pitied, who think of nothing but dangers long passed by, and but little of the perils that actually surround them.