We preserve the whole of our feelings
still native and entire, unsophisticated by pedantry and infidelity. We
have real hearts of flesh and blood beating in our bosoms. We fear God;
we look up with awe to kings; with affection to parliaments; with duty
to magistrates; with reverence to priests; and with respect to nobility.
Why? Because when such ideas are brought before our minds, it is NATURAL
to be so affected; because all other feelings are false and spurious,
and tend to corrupt our minds, to vitiate our primary morals, to render
us unfit for rational liberty; and by teaching us a servile, licentious,
and abandoned insolence, to be our low sport for a few holidays, to make
us perfectly fit for, and justly deserving of, slavery, through the
whole course of our lives.
You see, sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess,
that we are generally men of untaught feelings; that instead of casting
away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable
degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because
they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more
generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid
to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason;
because we suspect that the stock in each man is small, and that the
individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and
capital of nations and of ages.
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