MONASTIC INSTITUTIONS. THERE are moments in the fortune of ftates when particular men are called to make improvements by great mental exertion. In thofe moments, even when they feem to enjoy the confidence of their prince and country, and to be invested with full authority, they have not always apt inftruments. A politician, to do great things, looks for a power, what our workmen call a purchafe; and if he finds that power, in politics as in mechanics, he cannot be at a lofs to apply it. In the monaftic inftitutions, in my opinion, was found a great power for the mechanism of politic benevolence. There were revenues with a public direction; there were men wholly fet apart and dedicated to public purposes, without any other than public ties and public principles; men without the poffibility of converting the eftate of the community into a private fortune; men denied to felfinterefts, whofe avarice is for fome community; men to whom perfonal poverty is honour, and implicit obedience stands in the place of freedom. In vain fhall a man look to the poffibility of making fuch things when he wants them. The winds blow as they lift. These inftitutions are the products of enthusiasm; they are the inftruments af wifdom. Wisdom cannot create materials; they are the gifts of nature or of chance; her pride is in the ufe. The perennial exiftence of bodies corporate and their fortunes, are things particularly fuited to a man who has long views; who meditates defigns that require time in fashioning; and which propofe duration when they are accomplished. He is not deferving to rank high, or even to be mentioned in the order of great ftatefmen, who, having obtained the command and direction of fuch a power as exifted in the wealth, the difcipline, and the habits of fuch corporations, as thofe which you have rafhly deftroyed, cannot find any way of converting it to, the great and lafting benefit of his country. On the view of this subjec a thousand ufes fuggeft themselves to a contriving mind. To deftroy any power, growing wild from the rank productive force of the human mind, is almost tantamount, in the moral world, to the deftruction of the apparently active properties of bodies in the material. It would be like the attempt to deftroy (if it were in our competence to destroy) the expanfive force of fixed air in nitre, or the power of steam, or of electricity, or of magnetism. These energies always exifted in nature, and they were al、 ways difcernible. They feemed, fome of them unferviceable, fome noxious, fome no better than a fport to children; until contemplative ability, com, bining with practic skill, tamed their wild nature, fubdued them to ufe, and rendered them at once the most powerful and the most tractable agents, in subfervience to the great views and defigns of men, Did fifty thousand perfons, whofe mental and whose bodily labour you might direct, and so many hundred thousand a year of a revenue, which was neither lazy nor fuperftitious, appear too big for your abilities to wield? Had you no way of ufing the men but by converting monks into penfioners? Had you no way of turning the revenue to account, but through the improvident refource of a spendthrift fale? If you were thus deftitute of mental funds, the proceeding is in its natural courfe. Your politicians do not understand their trade; and therefore they fell their tools. But the inftitutions favour of fuperftition in their very principle; and they nourish it by a permanent and ftanding influence. This I do not mean to difpute; but this ought not to hinder you from deriving from fuperftition itself any refources which may thence be furnifhed for the public advantage. You derive benefits from many difpofitions and many paffions of the human mind, which are of as doubtful a colour in the moral eye, as fuperftition itself. It ( 215 ) was your bufinefs to correct and mitigate every thing which was noxious in this paffion, as in all the paffions. But is fuperftition the greatest of all poffible vices? In its poffible excefs I think it becomes a very great evil. It is, however, a moral fubject; and, of courfe, admits of all degrees and all modifications. Superftition is the religion of feeble minds; and they must be tolerated in an intermixture of it, in fome trifling or fome enthufiaftic fhape or other, elfe you will deprive weak minds of a refource found neceffary to the ftrongeft. The body of all true religion confifts, to be fure, in obedience to the will of the fovereign of the world; in a confidence in his declarations; and an imitation of his perfections. The reft is our own, It may be prejudicial to the great end; it may be auxiliary. Wife men, who as fuch, are not admirers (not admirers at least of the Munera Terra) are not violently attached to thefe things, nor do they violently hate them. Wifdom is not the moft fevere corrector of folly. They are the rival follies, which mutually wage fo unrelenting a war; and which make fo cruel a ufe of their ad vantages, as they can happen to engage the immoderate vulgar on the one fide or the other in their quarrels. Prudence would be neuter; but if, in the contention between fond attachment and fierce antipathy concerning things in their nature not made to produce fuch heats, a prudent man were obliged to make a choice of what errors and exceffes of enthu fiafm he would condemn or bear, perhaps he would think the fuperftition which builds, to be more toierable than that which demolifhes-that which adorns a country, than that which deforms it-that which endows, than that which plunders-that which dif pofes to miftaken beneficence, than that which ftimulates to real injuftice-that which leads a man to re fufe to himfelf lawful pleafures, than that which fnatches from others the fcanty fubfiftence of their felf-denial. Such, I think, is very nearly the ftate of the queftion between the antient founders of monkish fuperftition, and the fuperftition of the pretended philofophers of the hour. Reflections on the Revo ution in France. MISFORTUNE. MISFORTUNE is not crime, nor is indifcretion always the greatest guilt.-Ibid. MAGNA CHARTA. SEE PETITION OF RIGHTS, DECLARATION OF RIGHTS. Our oldest reformation is that of Magna Charta. Sir Edward Coke, that great oracle of our law, and, indeed, all the great men who follow him, to Blackftone, are induftrious to prove the pedigree of our liberties. They endeavour to prove, that the ancient charter, the Magna Charta of King John, was connected with another politive charter from Henry the First, and that both the one and the other were nothing more than a re-affirmative of the ftill more ancient ftanding law of the kingdom. In the matter of fact, for the quarter part, thefe authors appear to be in the right, perhaps not always; but if the lawyers miftalte in fome particulars, it proves my pofition fill the more ftrongly; becaufe it demonftrates the powerful prepoffeflion towards antiquity, with which the minds of all our lawyers, and legiflators, and of all the people, when they wish to influence, have been always filled; and the ftationary policy of this kingdom in confidering their most facred rights and franchifes as an inheritance. Ibid. MONARCHY ABSOLUTE. NONE of us love abfolute and uncontroled monarchy; but we could not rejoice at the fufferings of a Marcus Aurelius, or a Trajan, who were abfolute monarchs, as we do when Nero is condemned by the fenate to be punished more majorum: Nor when that monfter was obliged to fly with his wife Sporus, and to drink puddle, were men affected in the fame manner, as when the venerable Galba, with all his faults and errors, was murdered by a revolted mercenary foldiery. With fuch things before our eyes, our feelings contradict our theories; and when this is the cafe, the feelings are true, and the theory is falfe. What I contend for is, that in commending the deftruction of an abfolute monarchy, all the circumftances ought not to be wholly overlooked, as confiderations fit only for fhallow and fuperficial minds. -Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs. MORALITY. THE lines of morality are not like the ideal lines of mathematics. They are broad and deep as well as long. They admit of exceptions; they demand modifications. Ibid. METAPHYSICS. METAPHYSICS cannot live without definition. Ibid. { MANNERS AND POLITICS Applicable to every Age. EVERY age has its own manners, and its politics dependent upon them; and the fame attempts will not be made against a conftitution fully formed and matured, that were used to destroy it in the cradle, or to refift its growth during its infancy.-Thoughts on the Caufe of the prefent Difcontents. MERCHANTS. Properties of Merchants applied to the Eaft-India Company. THE principle of buying cheap and felling dear is the first, the great foundation of mercantile dealing. |