Liberty is not sacrificed to a zeal for religion, but a zeal for religion is pretended and assumed to destroy liberty.
Edmund Burke
The Public Record
Edmund Burke was an Anglo-Irish writer, philosopher, and politician who is widely credited as the founder of the cultural and political philosophy of conservatism. Regarded as one of the most influential conservative thinkers and political writers of the 18th century, Burke spent the majority of his career in Great Britain and was elected as a member of Parliament (MP) from 1766 to 1794 in the House of Commons of Great Britain with the Whig Party. His writings played a significant role in influencing public views and opinions in both Great Britain and France following the French Revolution in 1789, and he remains a major figure in modern conservative circles.
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To-day the question is this: Are we to make the best of this situation, which we cannot alter?
This is what experience teaches, and what all men of sense of all descriptions know.
The result is, you cannot make the people Protestants, and they cannot shake off a Protestant government.
This is a state of things which no man in his senses can call perfectly happy.
You have an ecclesiastical establishment, which, though the religion of the prince, and of most of the first class of landed proprietors, is not the religion of the major part of the inhabitants, and which consequently does not answer to…
Are we to govern this mixed body as if it were composed of the most simple elements, comprehending the whole in one system of benevolent legislation? or are we not rather to provide for the several parts according to the various and…
It has a people who are to be preserved too, and to be led by reason, principle, sentiment, and interest to acquiesce in that government.
Instead of prating about Protestant ascendencies, Protestant Parliaments ought, in my opinion, to think at last of becoming patriot Parliaments.
But is it because I love the Church, and the King, and the privileges of Parliament, that I am to be ready for any violence, or any injustice, or any absurdity, in the means of supporting any of these powers, or all of them together?
These are some of my reasons for wishing the support of the Church of Ireland as by law established.
I respect the Catholic hierarchy and the Presbyterian republic; but I know that the hope or the fear of establishing either of them is, in these kingdoms, equally chimerical, even if I preferred one or the other of them to the…
Its fall would leave a great void, which nothing else, of which I can form any distinct idea, might fill.
The body and substance of every religion I regard much more than any of the forms and dogmas of the particular sects.
I have another and infinitely a stronger reason for wishing it well: it is, that in the present time I consider it as one of the main pillars of the Christian religion itself.
I wish it well, because it is more closely combined than any other of the church systems with the crown, which is the stay of the mixed Constitution,--because it is, as things now stand, the sole connecting political principle between the…
I wish it well, as the religion of the greater number of the primary land-proprietors of the kingdom, with whom all establishments of Church and Stats, for strong political reasons, ought in my opinion to be firmly connected.
It is a great link towards holding fast the connection of religion with the State, and for keeping these two islands, in their present critical independence of constitution, in a close connection of opinion and affection.
There is no character, when malignantly taken up and deliberately pursued, which more naturally excites indignation and abhorrence in mankind, especially in that part of mankind which suffers from it.
When men are constantly accused, but know themselves not to be guilty, they must naturally abhor their accusers.
Let us not make the malignant fictions of our own imaginations, heated with factious controversies, reasons for keeping men that are neither guilty nor justly suspected of crime in a servitude equally dishonorable and unsafe to religion…
Let the crime and the punishment stand upon their own bottom.
Have men no self-interest, no avarice, no repugnance to public imposts?
It is not from the spirit of zeal, but the spirit of whiskey, that these wretches act.
Alas! it is not about popes, but about potatoes, that the minds of this unhappy people are agitated.
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