Viscount Henry St. John Bolingbroke

“ I could expect no quarter from the Whigs, for I had deserved none. There were persons amongst them for whom I had great esteem and friendship; yet neither with these, nor with any others, had I preserved a secret correspondence, which might be of use to me in the day of distress: and besides the general character of my party, I knew that particular prejudices were entertained against me at Hanover. The Whigs wanted nothing but an opportunity of attacking the peace, and it could hardly be imagined that they would stop there. ”

“ We might, most probably, lose our religion and liberty by the bigotry of the Prince and the corruption of the people. We should have no chance of preserving them but by an entire change of the whole frame of our Government or by another revolution. What reasonable man would voluntarily reduce himself to the necessity of making an option among such melancholy alternatives?
The best which could be hoped for, were the Chevalier on the throne, would be that a thread of favourable accidents, improved by the wisdom and virtue of Parliament, might keep off the evil day during his reign. ”

“ He is naturally inclined to believe the worst, which I take to be a certain mark of a mean spirit and a wicked soul. At least, I am sure that the contrary quality, when it is not due to weakness of understanding, is the fruit of a generous temper and an honest heart. Prone to judge ill of all mankind, he will rarely be seduced by his credulity, but I never knew a man so capable of being the bubble of his distrust and jealousy. He was so in this case, although the Queen, who could not be ignorant of the truth, said enough to undeceive him. ”

“ The philosophy of one has forced its way into general approbation, that of the other has carried no conviction and scarce any information to those who have misspent their time about it. To speak the truth, though it may seem a paradox, our knowledge on many subjects, and particularly on those which we intend here, must be superficial to be real. This is the condition of humanity. We are placed, as it were, in an intellectual twilight, where we discover but few things clearly, and none entirely, and yet see just enough to tempt us with the hope of making better and more discoveries. ”

“ Is deep meditation and justness of reasoning confined to men of that order by a peculiar and exclusive privilege? In short, and to ask a question which experience will decide, have these men who boast that they are appointed by God “to be the interpreters of His secret will, to represent His person, and to answer in His name, as it were, out of the sanctuary”—have these men, I say, been able in more than seventeen centuries to establish an uniform system of revealed religion—for natural religion never wanted their help among the civil societies of Christians—or even in their own? ”

“ To be contented to know things as God has made us capable of knowing them is, then, a first principle necessary to secure us from falling into error; and if there is any subject upon which we should be most on our guard against error, it is surely that which I have called here the first philosophy. God is hid from us in the majesty of His nature, and the little we discover of Him must be discovered by the light that is reflected from His works. ”

“ Till the time of the Queen’s death it stands, I believe, even between us. The Tories distinguished me by their approbation and by the credit which I had amongst them, and I endeavoured to distinguish myself in their service, under the immediate weight of great discouragement and with the not very distant prospect of great danger. Since that time the account is not so even, and I dare appeal to any impartial person whether my side in it be that of the debtor. As to the opinion of mankind in general, and the judgment which posterity will pass on these matters, I am under no great concern. ”

“ Let us not imagine, like some who are called freethinkers, that every man, who can think and judge for himself, as he has a right to do, has therefore a right of speaking, any more than of acting, according to the full freedom of his thoughts. The freedom belongs to him as a rational creature; he lies under the restraint as a member of society.
If the religion we profess contained nothing more than articles of faith and points of doctrine clearly revealed to us in the Gospel, we might be obliged to renounce our natural freedom of thought in favour of this supernatural authority. ”

“ Let your satire chastise, and, if it be possible, humble that pride, which is the fruitful parent of their vain curiosity and bold presumption; which renders them dogmatical in the midst of ignorance, and often sceptical in the midst of knowledge. The man who is puffed up with this philosophical pride, whether divine or theist, or atheist, deserves no more to be respected than one of those trifling creatures who are conscious of little else than their animality, and who stop as far short of the attainable perfections of their nature as the other attempts to go beyond them. ”

“ I should fear an attempt to alter the established religion as much as they who have the most bigot attachment to it, and for reasons as good as theirs, though not entirely the same. I speak only of the duty of every private man to examine for himself, which would have an immediate good effect relatively to himself, and might have in time a good effect relatively to the public, since it would dispose the minds of men to a greater indifference about theological disputes, which are the disgrace of Christianity and have been the plagues of the world. ”

“ But if the fear of hell should dissipate all other fears in the Pretender’s mind, and carry him, which is frequently the effect of that passion, to the most desperate undertakings; if among his successors a man bold enough to make the attempt should arise, the condition of the British nation would be still more deplorable. The attempt succeeding, we should fall into tyranny; for a change of religion could never be brought about by consent; and the same force that would be sufficient to enslave our consciences, would be sufficient for all the other purposes of arbitrary power. ”

“ He who had dictated not long before a memorial wherein it was asserted that to have a prospect of succeeding in this enterprise there must be a universal insurrection, and that such an insurrection was in no sort probable, unless a body of troops was brought to support it? He who thought that the consequence of failing, when the attempt was once made, must be the utter ruin of the cause and the loss of the British liberty? He who concurred in demanding as a pis-aller, and the least which could be insisted on, arms, ammunition, artillery, money, and officers? ”

“ To consider attentively even the minutest phenomena of body and mind mortifies their pride. Rather than creep up slowly, à posteriori, to a little general knowledge, they soar at once as far and as high as imagination can carry them. From thence they descend again, armed with systems and arguments à priori; and, regardless how these agree or clash with the phenomena of Nature, they impose them on mankind. ”

“ What will the clamour be, and how will the same authority foment it, when you proceed to lash, in other instances, our want of elegance even in luxury, and our wild profusion, the source of insatiable rapacity, and almost universal venality? My mind forebodes that the time will come—and who knows how near it may be?—when other powers than those of Grub Street may be drawn forth against you, and when vice and folly may be avowedly sheltered behind a power instituted for better and contrary purposes—for the punishment of one, and for the reformation of both. ”

“ There was a perfect calm and universal submission through the whole kingdom. The Chevalier, indeed, set out as if his design had been to gain the coast and to embark for Great Britain; and the Court of France made a merit to themselves of stopping him and obliging him to return. But this, to my certain knowledge, was a farce acted by concert, to keep up an opinion of his character, when all opinion of his cause seemed to be at an end. ”

“ Natural religion will be to such a man no longer intricate, revealed religion will be no longer mysterious, nor the Word of God equivocal. Clearness and precision are two great excellences of human laws. How much more should we expect to find them in the law of God? They have been banished from thence by artificial theology, and he who is desirous to find them must banish the professors of it from his councils, instead of consulting them. He must seek for genuine Christianity with that simplicity of spirit with which it is taught in the Gospel by Christ Himself. ”

“ On the other hand, how few were there on whose assistance I could depend, or to whom I would, even in those circumstances, be obliged? The ferment in the nation was wrought up to a considerable height; but there was at that time no reason to expect that it could influence the proceedings in Parliament in favour of those who should be accused. Left to its own movement, it was much more proper to quicken than slacken the prosecutions; and who was there to guide its motions? The Tories who had been true to one another to the last were a handful, and no great vigour could be expected from them. ”

“ His religion is not founded on the love of virtue and the detestation of vice; on a sense of that obedience which is due to the will of the Supreme Being, and a sense of those obligations which creatures formed to live in a mutual dependence on one another lie under. The spring of his whole conduct is fear. Fear of the horns of the devil and of the flames of hell. ”

“ I cannot conclude my discourse on this occasion better than by putting you in mind of a passage you quoted to me once, with great applause, from a sermon of Foster, and to this effect: “Where mystery begins, religion ends.” The apophthegm pleased me much, and I was glad to hear such a truth from any pulpit, since it shows an inclination, at least, to purify Christianity from the leaven of artificial theology, which consists principally in making things that are very plain mysterious, and in pretending to make things that are impenetrably mysterious very plain. ”

“ It is this manner of philosophising, this preposterous method of beginning our search after truth out of the bounds of human knowledge, or of continuing it beyond them, that has corrupted natural theology and natural religion in all ages. They have been corrupted to such a degree that it is grown, and was so long since, as necessary to plead the cause of God, if I may use this expression after Seneca, against the divine as against the atheist ”

“ Particularly must it not be reputed madness in those of our religion to trust themselves in the hands of Roman Catholics? Must it not be reputed impudence in a Roman Catholic to expect that we should? he who looks upon us as heretics, as men in rebellion against a lawful—nay, a divine—authority, and whom it is, therefore, meritorious by all sorts of ways to reduce to obedience? There are many, I know, amongst them who think more generously, and whose morals are not corrupted by that which is called religion ”

“ By the first, men set out in the search of truth under the conduct of error, and work up their heated imaginations often to such a delirium that the more genius, and the more learning they have, the madder they grow. ”

“ If we beheld a shekinah, or divine presence, like the flame of a taper, on the heads of those who receive the imposition of hands, we might believe that they receive the Holy Ghost at the same time. But as we have no reason to believe what superstitious, credulous, or lying men (such as Cyprian himself was) reported formerly, that they might establish the proud pretensions of the clergy, so we have no reason to believe that five men of this order have any more of the Divine Spirit in our time, after they are ordained, than they had before. ”

“ His double-trimming character prevailed on him to talk with the Duke of Ormond, but it carried him no farther. I question not but he did, on this occasion, what you must have observed many men to do: we not only endeavour to impose on the world, but even on ourselves; we disguise our weakness, and work up in our minds an opinion that the measure which we fall into by the natural or habitual imperfection of our character is the effect of a principle of prudence or of some other virtue. ”

“ Experience has shown us how ready men are to court power and profit, and who can determine how far either the Tories or the Whigs would comply, in order to secure to themselves the enjoyment of all the places in the kingdom? Suppose, however, that a majority of true Israelites should be found, whom no temptation could oblige to bow the knee to Baal; in order to preserve the Government on one hand must they not destroy it on the other? ”

“ The Council of Regency which began to sit as soon as the Queen died, acted like a council of the Holy Office. Whoever looked on the face of the nation saw everything quiet; not one of those symptoms appearing which must have shown themselves more or less at that moment if in reality there had been any measures taken during the former reign to defeat the Protestant succession. His Majesty ascended the throne with as little contradiction and as little trouble as ever a son succeeded a father in the possession of a private patrimony. ”

“ On the hypothesis indeed that body and soul are two distinct substances, one of which subsists after the dissolution of the other, certain men, who have taken the whimsical title of metaphysicians, as if they had science beyond the bounds of Nature, or of Nature discoverable by others, have taken likewise to themselves the doctrine of mind; and have left that of body, under the name of physics, to a supposed inferior order of philosophers. ”

“ Is it possible that a man should be wounded with such blunt weapons? Much more than powder was asked for from the first, and I have already said that when the Chevalier came into Scotland, regular troops, artillery, etc., were demanded. Both he and the Earl of Mar judged it impossible to stand their ground without such assistance as these. How scandalous, then, must it be deemed that they suffer their dependents to spread in the world that for want of a little powder I forced them to abandon Scotland! ”