When the Anabaptists of Munster, in the sixteenth century, had filled Germany with confusion, by their system of levelling, and their wild opinions concerning property, to what country in Europe did not the progress of their fury furnish just cause of alarm?  Of all things, wisdom is the most terrified with epidemical fanaticism, because of all enemies it is that against which she is the least able to furnish any kind of resource.  We cannot be ignorant of the spirit of atheistical fanaticism, that is inspired by a multitude of writings dispersed with incredible assiduity and expense, and by sermons delivered in all the streets and places of public resort in Paris.  These writings and sermons have filled the populace with a black and savage atrocity of mind, which supersedes in them the common feelings of Nature, as well as all sentiments of morality and religion; insomuch that these wretches are induced to bear with a sullen patience the intolerable distresses brought upon them by the violent convulsions and permutations that have been made in property.[116] The spirit of proselytism attends this spirit of fanaticism.  They have societies to cabal and correspond at home and abroad for the propagation of their tenets.  The republic of Berne, one of the happiest, the most prosperous, and the best-governed countries upon earth, is one of the great objects at the destruction of which they aim.  I am told they have in some measure succeeded in sowing there the seeds of discontent.  They are busy throughout Germany.  Spain and Italy have not been untried.  England is not left out of the comprehensive scheme of their malignant charity:  and in England we find those who stretch out their arms to them, who recommend their example from more than one pulpit, and who choose, in more than one periodical meeting, publicly to correspond with them, to applaud them, and to hold them up as objects for imitation; who receive from them tokens of confraternity, and standards consecrated amidst their rites and mysteries;[117] who suggest to them leagues of perpetual amity, at the very time when the power to which our Constitution has exclusively delegated the federative capacity of this kingdom may find it expedient to make war upon them.

It is not the confiscation of our Church property from this example in France that I dread, though I think this would be no trifling evil.  The great source of my solicitude is, lest it should ever be considered in England as the policy of a state to seek a resource in confiscations of any kind, or that any one description of citizens should be brought to regard any of the others as their proper prey.[118] Nations are wading deeper and deeper into an ocean of boundless debt.  Public debts, which at first were a security to governments, by interesting many in the public tranquillity, are likely in their excess to become the means of their subversion.  If governments provide for these debts by heavy impositions, they perish by becoming odious to the people.  If they