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DIVINES bad Politic1 v. Miscellanea Alternative Larceny
Hence those declamations under the name of Luxury against every thing that can keep
men virtuous or make them happy: for virtuous is every people in exact proportion
as it is industrious, & in no degree whatever in proportion to the number & assiduity
of it's preachings & it's prayers — Would you have render a people virtuous and humane?
stimulate them by every encouragement you can devise to Labor, secure to them the
property of its fruits, and not permitt3, at1 least2, if not facilitate at proper intervals, their
enjoyment of them. Hence
those plesures drawn by the hand of dependency & in of colours false as they are glaring of ruin perpetually impending over a State, which if real, could by no human methods be averted. Men who have never
employd themselves in seriously moral speculations are the mischief and hardship of this, just as a man who is not — can not conceive the hardship of a prohibition [N.B. this is only by way of example & is not true] as to the mischief to put flecks & Tthraws into the Wool
It is this their Ecclesiastical Spirit, which more than any thing else was the ruin of one great empire, if the sagacious
Montesquieu is to be trusted — It is not the ruin of this, because comparatively
it has not prevalency but as far as it has any it has is a it's the weakness — It answers all it's energies operations and disturbs the view of the Principles on which they are founded.
Story of Spider & Bat — Antipathy
from l'Esprit - Ridiculuus! Madam I must tell you you are a wrong, & though it had been a spider — thus in consistent are Ch, of England men, once Sectaries themselves against other Sectaries. When I speak of the ecclesiastical spirit, I mean not any thing like an indiscriminate
censure on a respectable body of men — I certainly - mean not for example to censure
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the a Bishop of Gloucester Carlisle who defines Virtue to be the endever after General Happiness+ + censule locum
— so long as he <add>in as far as he is perseveres in those principles</add> A Bishop of Gloucester who — &c
under the same like limitation — a Priestly (to take a very wide step), who &c
under the like limitation — I mean all other divines who maintain principles
inconsistent, & those these if any where they depart relinquish from them
A Morality hollow false as it is gloomy contradictory as it is confused and which is not mischievous only because it is
impracticable evaporates at the opening of the closet door. I mean [only] that Spirit to which Ecclesiastical men are peculiarly obnoxious, as men of other professions are to respectively pernicious spirits of other kinds.
In inculcating these leading and important truths, that Probity consists, not in acting without
a motive, but in the consonance of a man's conduct to public utility, and that he
who has assigned a its motive [for it] has not thereby taken away it's merit. These endevors being bent upon persuading men to of their dependance on wise and salutary Laws founded on the knowledge of the Mechanism of the Human Heart, which they would back them to ; [and] to cast themselves upon those expedients of which they have assumed the guidance. require operations for which there are no motives adjusted to the
Human Frame: Then it is, they require Trade & Industry to be proscribed under the name & of Luxury:
Then it is they call upon the Merchant to give up his Trade, & the Lawyer his profession — & call upon
Idleness to prepare the way for Virtue to come and seat herself on her Throne.
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