In England most of us conceive that it is envy and malignity towards those who are often the beginners of their own fortune, and not a love of the self-denial and mortification of the ancient Church, that makes some look askance at the distinctions and honors and revenues which, taken from no person, are set apart for virtue.  The ears of the people of England are distinguishing.  They hear these men speak broad.  Their tongue betrays them.  Their language is in the patois of fraud, in the cant and gibberish of hypocrisy.  The people of England must think so, when these praters affect to carry back the clergy to that primitive evangelic poverty which in the spirit ought always to exist in them, (and in us, too, however we may like it,) but in the thing must be varied, when the relation of that body to the state is altered,—­when manners, when modes of life, when indeed the whole order of human affairs, has undergone a total revolution.  We shall believe those reformers to be then honest enthusiasts, not, as now we think them, cheats and deceivers, when we see them throwing their own goods into common, and submitting their own persons to the austere discipline of the early Church.

With these ideas rooted in their minds, the Commons of Great Britain, in the national emergencies, will never seek their resource from the confiscation of the estates of the Church and poor.  Sacrilege and proscription are not among the ways and means of our Committee of Supply.  The Jews in Change Alley have not yet dared to hint their hopes of a mortgage on the revenues belonging to the see of Canterbury.  I am not afraid that I shall be disavowed, when I assure you that there is not one public man in this kingdom, whom you wish to quote,—­no, not one, of any party or description,—­who does not reprobate the dishonest, perfidious, and cruel confiscation which the National Assembly has been compelled to make of that property which it was their first duty to protect.

It is with the exultation of a little national pride I tell you that those amongst us who have wished to pledge the societies of Paris in the cup of their abominations have been disappointed.  The robbery of your Church has proved a security to the possessions of ours.  It has roused the people.  They see with horror and alarm that enormous and shameless act of proscription.  It has opened, and will more and more open, their eyes upon the selfish enlargement of mind and the narrow liberality of sentiment of insidious men, which, commencing in close hypocrisy and fraud, have ended in open violence and rapine.  At home we behold similar beginnings.  We are on our guard against similar conclusions.