Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund BurkeBurke, Edmund
Philosophy
Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke
Burke, Edmund
Burke, Edmund, 1729-1797; Essays; Political science; Speeches, addresses, etc.
I call it ATHEISM BY ESTABLISHMENT, when any state, as such, shall not
acknowledge the existence of God as a moral governor of the world; when
it shall offer to him no religious or moral worship;--when it shall
abolish the Christian religion by a regular decree;--when it shall
persecute with a cold, unrelenting, steady cruelty, by every mode of
confiscation, imprisonment, exile, and death, all its ministers;--when
it shall generally shut up or pull down churches; when the few buildings
which remain of this kind shall be opened only for the purpose of
making a profane apotheosis of monsters, whose vices and crimes have
no parallel amongst men, and whom all other men consider as objects of
general detestation, and the severest animadversion of law. When, in
the place of that religion of social benevolence, and of individual
self-denial, in mockery of all religion, they institute impious,
blasphemous, indecent theatric rites, in honour of their vitiated,
perverted reason, and erect altars to the personification of their own
corrupted and bloody republic;--when schools and seminaries are founded
at the public expense to poison mankind, from generation to generation,
with the horrible maxims of this impiety;--when wearied out with
incessant martyrdom, and the cries of a people hungering and thirsting
for religion, they permit it only as a tolerated evil--I call this
ATHEISM BY ESTABLISHMENT.
CORRESPONDENT SYSTEM OF MANNERS AND MORALS.
When to these establishments of regicide, of jacobinism, and of atheism,
you add the CORRESPONDENT SYSTEM OF MANNERS, no doubt can be left on
the mind of a thinking man concerning their determined hostility to the
human race. Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a
great measure, the laws depend. The law touches us but here and there,
and now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify,
exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform,
insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in. They give
their whole form and colour to our lives. According to their quality,
they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them. Of this
the new French legislators were aware; therefore, with the same method,
and under the same authority, they settled a system of manners, the most
licentious, prostitute, and abandoned that ever has been known, and at
the same time the most coarse, rude, savage, and ferocious. Nothing in
the Revolution, no, not to a phrase or gesture, not to the fashion of a
hat or a shoe, was left to accident. All has been the result of design;
all has been matter of institution. No mechanical means could be devised
in favour of this incredible system of wickedness and vice, that has
not been employed. The noblest passions, the love of glory, the love
of country, have been debauched into means of its preservation and its
propagation. All sorts of shows and exhibitions, calculated to inflame
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