The Constitutional clergy are not the ministers of any
religion: they are the agents and instruments of this horrible
conspiracy against all morals. It was from a sense of this, that, in the
English addition to the articles proposed at St. Domingo, tolerating all
religions, we very wisely refused to suffer that kind of traitors and
buffoons.
This religious war is not a controversy between sect and sect, as
formerly, but a war against all sects and all religions. The question is
not, whether you are to overturn the Catholic, to set up the Protestant.
Such an idea, in the present state of the world, is too contemptible.
Our business is, to leave to the schools the discussion of the
controverted points, abating as much as we can the acrimony of
disputants on all sides. It is for Christian statesmen, as the world is
now circumstanced, to secure their common basis, and not to risk the
subversion of the whole fabric by pursuing these distinctions with an
ill-timed zeal. We have in the present grand alliance all modes of
government, as well as all modes of religion.
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