persuade by authority of the maxim, that the government in church and
state is wiser than the people, and therefore the best judge in every
matter? This, as asserted generally, was what the people firmly believed:
it has always, till lately, been the popular faith. But then, was the
benefit of this obsequious faith to go exclusively to the government of
just that particular time,--a government which, by its innovations and
demolitions, was exhibiting a contemptuous dissent from all past
government remembered in the land? Were the people not to hesitate a
moment to take this innovating government's word for it that all their
forefathers, up through a long series of ages, had been fools and dupes in
reverencing, in their time, the wisdom and authority of _their_ governors?
The most unthinking and submissive would feel that this was too much:
especially after they had proof that the government demanding so
prodigious a concession might, on the substitution of just one individual
for another at its head, revoke its own ordinances, and punish those who
should contumaciously continue to be ruled by them. You summon us, they
might have said to their governors, at your arbitrary dictate to renounce,
as what you are pleased to call idolatries and abominations, the faith and
rites held sacred by twenty generations of our ancestors and yours. We are
to do this on peril of your highest displeasure, and that of God, by whose
will you are professing to act; now who will ensure us that there may not
be, some time hence, a vindictive inquisition, to find who among us have
been the most ready of obedience to offer wicked insult to the Holy
Catholic Apostolic Church?

This deficiency of the moral power of the government, to promote the
progress of conviction in the mind of the nation, would be slenderly
supplied by the authority of the class next to the government in the claim
to deference, and even holding the precedence in actual influence,--that
is, the families of rank and consequence throughout the country. For the