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ON THE CONSTITUTION OF THE CHURCH AND STATE, ACCORDING TO THE IDEA OF EACH; WITH AIDS TOWARD A RIGHT JUDGMENT ON THE LATE CATHOLIC BILL

PARAGRAPH THE THIRD

THE mercantile and commercial class, in which I here comprise all the four classes that I have put in antithesis to the Landed Order, the guardian, and depositary of the Permanence of the Realm, as more characteristically conspiring to the interests of its progression, the improvement and general freedom of the country -- this class did, as I have already remarked, in the earlier states of the constitution, exist but as in the bud. But during all this period of potential existence, or what we may call the minority of the burgess order, the National Church was the substitute for the most important national benefits resulting from the same. The National Church presented the only breathing hole of hope. The church alone relaxed the iron fate by which feudal dependency, primogeniture and entail would otherwise have predestined every native of the realm to be lord or vassal. To the Church alone could the nation look for the benefits of existing knowledge, and for the means of future civilization. Lastly, let it never he forgotten, that under the fostering wings of the church, the class of free citizens and burgers were reared. To the feudal system we owe the forms, to the church the substance, of our liberty. We mention only two of many facts that would form the proof and comment of the above; first, the origin of towns and cities, in the privileges attached to the vicinity of churches and monasteries, and which preparing an asylum for the fugitive Vassal and oppressed Franklin, thus laid the first foundation of a class of freemen detached from the land. Secondly, the holy war, which the national clergy, in this instance faithful to their national duties, waged against slavery and villenage, and with such success, that in the reign of Charles II, the law which declared every native of the realm free by birth, had merely to sanction an opus jam consummatum. Our Maker has distinguished man from the brute that perishes, by making hope first an instinct of his nature; and secondly, an indispensable  condition of his moral intellectual progression:

"For every gift of noble origin,
Is breathed upon by Hope's perpetual breath."

-- WORDSWORTH.

But a natural instinct constitutes a right, as far as its gratification is compatible with the equal rights of others.

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