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Burke, Edmund, 1729-1797

"The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 04 (of 12)"

The Austrians have restored the clergy wherever they
obtained possession. We have proposed to restore religion as well as
monarchy; and in Toulon we have restored neither the one nor the other.
It is very likely that the Jacobin _sans-culottes_, or some of them,
objected to this measure, who rather choose to have the atheistic
buffoons of clergy they have got to sport with, till they are ready to
come forward, with the rest of their worthy brethren, in Paris and other
places, to declare that they are a set of impostors, that they never
believed in God, and never will preach any sort of religion. If we give
way to our Jacobins in this point, it is fully and fairly putting the
government, civil and ecclesiastical, not in the king of France, to
whom, as the protector and governor, and in substance the head of the
Gallican Church, the nomination to the bishoprics belonged, and who made
the Bishop of Toulon,--it does not leave it with him, or even in the
hands of the king of England, or the king of Spain,--but in the basest
Jacobins of a low seaport, to exercise, _pro tempore_, the sovereignty.


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