REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS.
In France you are now in the crisis of a revolution, and in the transit from one form of government to another—you cannot see that character of men exactly in the same situation in which we see it in this country. With us it is militant; with you it is triumphant; and you know how it can act when its power is commensurate to its will. I would not be supposed to confine those observations to any description of men, or to comprehend all men of any description within them—No! far from it. I am as incapable of that injustice, as I am of keeping terms with those who profess principles of extremes; and who, under the name of religion, teach little else than wild and dangerous politics. The worst of these politics of revolution is this: they temper and harden the breast, in order to prepare it for the desperate strokes which are sometimes used in extreme occasions. But as these occasions may never arrive, the mind receives a gratuitous taint; and the moral sentiments suffer not a little, when no political purpose is served by the depravation. This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man, that they have totally forgotten his nature. Without opening one new avenue to the understanding, they have succeeded in stopping up those that lead to the heart. They have perverted in themselves, and in those that attend to them, all the well-placed sympathies of the human breast.
This famous sermon of the Old Jewry breathes nothing but this spirit through all the political part. Plots, massacres, assassinations, seem to some people a trivial price for obtaining a revolution. A cheap, bloodless reformation, a guiltless liberty, appear flat and vapid to their taste. There must be a great change of scene; there must be a magnificent stage effect; there must be a grand spectacle to rouse the imagination, grown torpid with the lazy enjoyment of sixty years' security, and the still unanimating repose of public prosperity. The preacher found them all in the French revolution. This inspires a juvenile warmth through his whole frame. His enthusiasm kindles as he advances; and when he arrives at his peroration it is in a full blaze. Then viewing, from the Pisgah of his pulpit, the free, moral, happy, flourishing, and glorious state of France, as in a bird-eye landscape of a promised land, he breaks out into rapture.
TOLERATION BECOME INTOLERANT.
When any dissenters, or any body of people, come here with a petition, it is not the number of people, but the reasonableness of the request, that should weigh with the house. A body of dissenters come to this house, and say, Tolerate us—we desire neither the parochial advantage of tithes, nor dignities, nor the stalls of your cathedrals. No! let the venerable orders of the hierarchy exist with all their advantages. And shall I tell them, I reject your just and reasonable petition, not because it shakes the church, but because there are others, while you lie grovelling upon the earth, that will kick and bite you? Judge which of these descriptions of men comes with a fair request—that, which says, Sir, I desire liberty for my own, because I trespass on no man's conscience;—or the other, which says, I desire that these men should not be suffered to act according to their consciences, though I am tolerated to act according to mine. But I sign a body of articles, which is my title to toleration; I sign no more, because more are against my conscience. But I desire that you will not tolerate these men, because they will not go so far as I, though I desire to be tolerated, who will not go as far as you. No, imprison them, if they come within five miles of a corporate town, because they do not believe what I do in point of doctrines. Shall I not say to these men, "Arrangez-vous, canaille?" You, who are not the predominant power, will not give to others the relaxation, under which you are yourself suffered to live. I have as high an opinion of the doctrines of the church as you. I receive them implicitly, or I put my own explanation on them, or take that which seems to me to come best recommended by authority. There are those of the dissenters, who think more rigidly of the doctrine of the articles relative to predestination, than others do. They sign the article relative to it ex animo, and literally. Others allow a latitude of construction. These two parties are in the church, as well as among the dissenters; yet in the church we live quietly under the same roof. I do not see why, as long as Providence gives us no further light into this great mystery, we should not leave things as the Divine wisdom has left them. But suppose all these things to me to be clear (which Providence however seems to have left obscure), yet whilst dissenters claim a toleration in things which, seeming clear to me, are obscure to them, without entering into the merit of the articles, with what face can these men say, Tolerate us, but do not tolerate them? Toleration is good for all, or it is good for none.
The discussion this day is not between establishment on one hand, and toleration on the other, but between those, who being tolerated themselves, refuse toleration to others. That power should be puffed up with pride, that authority should degenerate into rigour, if not laudable, is but too natural. But this proceeding of theirs is much beyond the usual allowance to human weakness; it not only is shocking to our reason, but it provokes our indignation. Quid domini facient, audent cum talia fures? It is not the proud prelate thundering in his commission court, but a pack of manumitted slaves with the lash of the beadle flagrant on their backs, and their legs still galled with their fetters, that would drive their brethren into that prison-house from whence they have just been permitted to escape. If, instead of puzzling themselves in the depths of the Divine counsels, they would turn to the mild morality of the Gospel, they would read their own condemnation:—O thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt because thou desiredst me: shouldest not thou also have compassion on thy fellow-servant, even as I had pity on thee?