It is on some such principles that the majority of the people of England, far from thinking a religious national establishment unlawful, hardly think it lawful to be without one.  In France you are wholly mistaken, if you do not believe us above all other things attached to it, and beyond all other nations; and when this people has acted unwisely and unjustifiably in its favor, (as in some instances they have done, most certainly,) in their very errors you will at least discover their zeal.

This principle runs through the whole system of their polity.  They do not consider their Church establishment as convenient, but as essential to their state:  not as a thing heterogeneous and separable,—­something added for accommodation,—­what they may either keep up or lay aside, according to their temporary ideas of convenience.  They consider it as the foundation of their whole Constitution, with which, and with every part of which, it holds an indissoluble union.  Church and State are ideas inseparable in their minds, and scarcely is the one ever mentioned without mentioning the other.

Our education is so formed as to confirm and fix this impression.  Our education is in a manner wholly in the hands of ecclesiastics, and in all stages from infancy to manhood.  Even when our youth, leaving schools and universities, enter that most important period of life which begins to link experience and study together, and when with that view they visit other countries, instead of old domestics whom we have seen as governors to principal men from other parts, three fourths of those who go abroad with our young nobility and gentlemen are ecclesiastics:  not as austere masters, nor as mere followers; but as friends and companions of a graver character, and not seldom persons as well born as themselves.  With them, as relations, they most commonly keep up a close connection through life.  By this connection we conceive that we attach our gentlemen to the Church; and we liberalize the Church by an intercourse with the leading characters of the country.

So tenacious are we of the old ecclesiastical modes and fashions of institution, that very little alteration has been made in them since the fourteenth or fifteenth century:  adhering in this particular, as in all things else, to our old settled maxim, never entirely nor at once to depart from antiquity.  We found these old institutions, on the whole, favorable to morality and discipline; and we thought they were susceptible of amendment, without altering the ground.  We thought that they were capable of receiving and meliorating, and above all of preserving, the accessions of science and literature, as the order of Providence should successively produce them.  And after all, with this Gothic and monkish education, (for such it is in the groundwork,) we may put in our claim to as ample and as early a share in all the improvements in science, in arts, and in literature, which have illuminated and adorned the modern world, as any other nation in Europe:  we think one main cause of this improvement was our not despising the patrimony of knowledge which was left us by our forefathers.