Religion is God's legislation. He alone dispenses its
sanctions, and these sanctions are mostly of another world.
Were the governments of this earth, to legislate for the inhabitants of the moon, the absurdity and inefficacy of such
laws would be less, than laws for taking care of human
souls, by settling the rights of God, and the religious duties of man. If man, by his laws, can regulate his duties
to God, he can increase, diminish or expunge them; and
has more power over the deity, than Canute had over the
ocean.
This aggravated species of sacrilege is perpetrated by governments to gratify ambition or avarice; but they endeavour to hide their true design, under the pretence that it is good policy to make a vulgar, that is, a false religion by law. It is but a vulgar kind of veneration for the deity, which supposes, that the bulk of mankind can be better governed by man's frauds, than by his truths. The idea, that God made a true religion only for a few learned men, and gave them a commission to make false religions for the vulgar, from time to time, supposes that the deity was unable to legislate for the great mass of his creatures. By reserving truth for the learned, and cheating the ignorant into virtue, religion is considered as necessary for the first class, and superstition as sufficient for the second, without any divine authority for the discrimination. But governments do not perceive the high encomium they thus pass upon the people, by admitting, that the light of religion is necessary to check the propensity of the wise for vice, and that the blindness of superstition is unable to corrupt the propensity of the vulgar for virtue. And thus discover that they foster a delusion incapable of making men better in this world, or happier in the next, from their own secret avarice, ambition and atheism.
Governments and hierarchies have annexed a sanctity to the utensils of religion, which they will not allow to religion itself. To protect these utensils, artfully blended with their usurpations, they have invented the term, "sacrilege."
