They are too holy and sacred to be altered, taken away or
applied to any temporal purpose. Less delicate with religion, they form and transform it, for wicked temporal
ends; and the only good one they pretend to expect from
the trade of religion-making, is, that the vail of a treacherous or delutled concurrence, drawn by law over a nation,
will produce good order and morality. Are deceit, purchased by office, or imposed by fear, and ignorance produced by
fraud, good nourishers of moral virtues? Will habitual insincerity to God, habituate us to sincerity in our commerce
with men?
A new species of political atheism or polytheism is making its appearance, and gradually gaining ground among mankind, more specious, insidious and dangerous than the old. It is that of making government the patron of the whole tribe of tenets or metaphysical idols, existing, or capable of being invented. We will suppose only an hundred of these in a nation, each pronouncing the rest to be damnable errours. You shall adventure your soul, says a government, upon a lottery, wherein the chances are an hundred to one against you. Why are men driven by law into this injudicious species of gambling? Because governments believe in neither of these metaphysical idols, and gain power by patronising all. Had they believed any one to be the herald of salvation, they would have exhibited some preference for truth, or at least have forborne to coerce men by penalty into an election, deterringly fortuitous.
A polytheism of tenets would probably have appeared as ridiculous to the ancients, as their polytheism of wooden idols does to us. Without settling the point of plurality, between physical and metaphysical polytheism, they might have considered it as more likely that all their gods existed, than that all our contradictory tenets were true; and they might have urged the emblematical nature of their system, to shew that it was less polytheistical, than a political patronage of a pantheon of tenets. A government which
