must be tolerated in an intermixture of it, in some trifling or some enthusiastic shape or other, else you will deprive weak minds of a resource found necessary to the strongest.  The body of all true religion consists, to be sure, in obedience to the will of the Sovereign of the world, in a confidence in His declarations, and in imitation of His perfections.  The rest is our own.  It may be prejudicial to the great end,—­it may be auxiliary.  Wise men, who, as such, are not admirers, (not admirers at least of the munera terrae,) are not violently attached to these things, nor do they violently hate them.  Wisdom is not the most severe corrector of folly.  They are the rival follies which mutually wage so unrelenting a war, and which make so cruel a use of their advantages, as they can happen to engage the immoderate vulgar, on the one side or the other, in their quarrels.  Prudence would be neuter; but if, in the contention between fond attachment and fierce antipathy concerning things in their nature not made to produce such heats, a prudent man were obliged to make a choice of what errors and excesses of enthusiasm he would condemn or bear, perhaps he would think the superstition which builds to be more tolerable than that which demolishes,—­that which adorns a country, than that which deforms it,—­that which endows, than that which plunders,—­that which disposes to mistaken beneficence, than that which stimulates to real injustice,—­that which leads a man to refuse to himself lawful pleasures, than that which snatches from others the scanty subsistence of their self-denial.  Such, I think, is very nearly the state of the question between the ancient founders of monkish superstition and the superstition of the pretended philosophers of the hour.

For the present I postpone all consideration of the supposed public profit of the sale, which, however, I conceive to be perfectly delusive.  I shall here only consider it as a transfer of property.  On the policy of that transfer I shall trouble you with a few thoughts.

In every prosperous community something more is produced than goes to the immediate support of the producer.  This surplus forms the income of the landed capitalist.  It will be spent by a proprietor who does not labor.  But this idleness is itself the spring of labor, this repose the spur to industry.  The only concern for the state is, that the capital taken in rent from the land should be returned again to the industry from whence it came, and that its expenditure should be with the least possible detriment to the morals of those who expend it and to those of the people to whom it is returned.