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magiftrates, fenates, parliaments, national affemblies, judges, and captains. You would not cure the evil by refolving, that there should be no more monarchs, nor ministers of state, nor of the gospel; no interpreters of law; no general officers; no public councils. You might change the names. The things in fome shape must remain. A certain quantum of power must always exist in the community, in some hands, and under fome appellation. Wife men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names; to the causes of evil which are permanent, not to the occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear. Otherwise you will be wife.. historically, a fool in practice. Seldom have two ages the fame fashion in their pretexts and the fame modes of mischief. Wickedness is a little more inventive. Whilft you are difcuffing fashion, the fashion is gone by. The very fame vice affumes a new body. The spirit tranfmigrates; and, far from lofing its principle of life by the change of its appearance, it is renovated in its new organs with the fresh vigour of a juvenile activity. It walks abroad; it continues its ravages; whilst you. are gibbeting the carcass, or demolishing the tomb. You are terrifying yourself with ghosts and apparitions, whilft your house is the haunt of robbers. It is thus with all those, who, attending only to the shell and husk of hiftory, think they are waging war with intolerance, pride, and cruelty, whilft, under.co lour of abhorring the ill principles of antiquated parties, they are authorizing and feeding the fame odious vices in different factions, and perhaps in worse...

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Your citizens of Paris formerly had lent them. felves as the ready instruments to flaughter the followers of Calvin, at the infamous massacre of St. Bartholomew. What should we say to those who could think of retaliating on the Parifians of this day the abominations and horrors of that time? They are indeed brought to abhor that massacre. Ferocious as they are, it is not difficult to make them dislike it; because the politicians and fashionable teachers have no interest in giving their passions exactly the fame direction. Still however they find it their interest to keep the same savage dispositions alive. It was but the other day that they caused this very massacre to be acted on the stage for the diverfion of the defcendants of those who committed it. In this tragic farce they produced the cardinal of Lorraine in his robes of function, ordering general flaughter. Was this spectacle intended to make the Parifians abhor perfecution, and loath the effufion of blood? No, it was to teach them to perfecute their own pastors; it was to excite them, by raising a disgust and horror of their clergy, to an alacrity in hunting down to destruction an order, which, if it ought to exist at all, ought to exist not only in fafety, but in reverence. It was to stimulate their cannibal appetites (which one would think had been gorged sufficiently) by variety and seasoning; and to quicken them to an alertness in new murders and massacres, if it should fuit the purpose of the Guises of the day. An assembly, in which fat a multitude of priests and prelates, was obliged to fuffer this indignity at its door. The author was not fent to the gallies, nor the players to the house

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of correction. Not long after this exhibition, those players came forward to the assembly to claim the rites of that very religion which they had dared to expose, and to shew their prostituted faces in the fenate, whilst the archbishop of Paris, whose function was known to his people only by his prayers and benedictions, and his wealth only by his alms, is forced to abandon his house, and to fly from his flock (as from ravenous wolves) because, truly, in the fixteenth century, the Cardinal of Lorraine was a rebel and a murderer.

Such is the effect of the perverfion of history, by those, who, for the fame nefarious purposes, have perverted every other part of learning. But those who will stand upon that elevation of reason, which places centuries under our eye, and brings things to the true point of comparifon, which obscures little names, and effaces the colours of little parties, and to which nothing can afcend but the spirit and moral quality of human actions, will say to the teachers of the Palais Royal, -the Cardinal of Lorraine was the murderer of the fixteenth century, you have the glory of being the murderers in the eighteenth; and this is the only difference between you. But history, in the nineteenth century, better understood, and better employed, will, I trust, teach a civilized pofterity to abhor the mifdeeds of both these barbarous ages. It will teach future priests and magistrates not to retaliate upon the fpeculative and inactive atheists of future times, the enormities committed by the present practical zealots and furious fanatics of that wretched error, which, in its quiefcent state, is more than punished, whenever

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whenever it is embraced. It will teach pofterity not to make war upon either religion or philofophy, for the abuse which the hypocrites of both have made of the two most valuable blessings conferred upon us by the bounty of the univerfal Patron, who in all things eminently favours and protects the race of man.

If your clergy, or any clergy, should shew themselves vicious beyond the fair bounds allowed to human infirmity, and to those professional faults which can hardly be separated from professional virtues, though their vices never can countenance the exercise of oppression, I do admit, that they would naturally have the effect of abating very much of our indignation against the tyrants who exceed measure and justice in their punishment. I can allow in clergymen, through all their divisions, some tenaciousness of their own opinion; some overflowings of zeal for its propagation; fome predilection to their own state and office; fome attachment to the interest of their own corps; fome preference to those who liften with docility to their doctrines, beyond those who scorn and deride them. I allow all this, because I am a man who have to deal with men, and who would not, through a violence of toleration, run into the greatest of all intolerance. I must bear with infirmities until they fefter into crimes.

Undoubtedly, the natural progress of the pafsions, from frailty to vice ought to be prevented by a watchful eye and a firm hand. But is it true that the body of your clergy had past those limits of a just

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a just allowance? From the general style of your late publications of all forts, one would be led to believe that your clergy in France were a fort of monsters; an horrible compofition of superstition, ignorance, floth, fraud, avarice, and tyranny. But is this true? Is it true, that the lapse of time, the ceffation of conflicting interests, the woful experience of the evils resulting from party rage, has had no fort of influence gradually to meliorate their minds? Is it true, that they were daily renewing invasions on the civil power, troubling the domestic quiet of their country, and rendering the operations of its government feeble and precarious? Is it true, that the clergy of our times have pressed down the laity with an iron hand, and were, in all places, lighting up the fires of a savage perfecution? Did they by every fraud endeavour to encrease their estates? Did they use to exceed the due demands on estates that were their own? Or, rigidly fcrewing up right into wrong, did they convert a legal claim into a vexatious extortion ? When not poffefsed of power, were they filled with the vices of those who envy it? Were they enflamed with a violent litigious spirit of controversy? Goaded on with the ambition of intellectual sovereignty, were they ready to fly in the face of all magistracy, to fire churches, to massacre the priests of other descriptions, to pull down al tars, and to make their way over the ruins of fubverted governments to an empire of doctrine, fometimes flattering, sometimes forcing the consciences of men from the jurifdiction of public institutions

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