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DIVINES bad Politic:
Hence the 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 as degree whatever in proporption to the number & assiduity of its preachings & its prayers. Would you have render a people virtuous and humane? stimulate them by every encouragement you can desire to Labor, secure to them the property of its fruits, and permitt 3 at 1 least, 2 if not facilitate at proper intervals, their enjoyment of them.
Hence those pcitures drawn by the hand of dependency & in 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 moral speculations are just as a man who is not a 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 & into the
It is this their Ecclesiastical Spirit, whihc 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 its one weakness.
Story of Spider & Bat—Antipathy froml'Esprit—ridiculous! Madam I must tell you you are wrong, & though it had been a spider—thus inconsistent 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
the a Bishop of Gloucester Carlisle who defines Virtue to be the endevor after General Happiness+
so long as he in so far as he perseveres in those principles A Bishop of Gloucesster who
+ consult locum
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, & these if any where they depart from relinquish 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 respectively to 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 [to it] has not thereby taken away its merit.
Their endevors being bent upon persuading men to of their dependance on Laws founded on the knowledge of the Mechanism of the Human Heart, which they would 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 Framce: Then it is, they require Trade & Industry to be exercised 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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jeremy bentham |
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