The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV | Page 5

a state of order, did not look for dispensers of
justice in the instruments of his usurpation. Quite the contrary. He
sought out, with great solicitude and selection, and even from the party
most opposite to his designs, men of weight and decorum of
character,--men unstained with the violence of the times, and with
hands not fouled with confiscation and sacrilege: for he chose an Hale
for his chief justice, though he absolutely refused to take his civic oaths,
or to make any acknowledgment whatsoever of the legality of his
government. Cromwell told this great lawyer, that, since he did not
approve his title, all he required of him was to administer, in a manner
agreeable to his pure sentiments and unspotted character, that justice
without which human society cannot subsist,--that it was not his
particular government, but civil order itself, which, as a judge, he
wished him to support. Cromwell knew how to separate the institutions

expedient to his usurpation from the administration of the public justice
of his country. For Cromwell was a man in whom ambition had not
wholly suppressed, but only suspended, the sentiments of religion, and
the love (as far as it could consist with his designs) of fair and
honorable reputation. Accordingly, we are indebted to this act of his for
the preservation of our laws, which some senseless assertors of the
rights of men were then on the point of entirely erasing, as relics of
feudality and barbarism. Besides, he gave, in the appointment of that
man, to that age, and to all posterity, the most brilliant example of
sincere and fervent piety, exact justice, and profound jurisprudence.[2]
But these are not the things in which your philosophic usurpers choose
to follow Cromwell.
One would think, that, after an honest and necessary revolution, (if they
had a mind that theirs should pass for such,) your masters would have
imitated the virtuous policy of those who have been at the head of
revolutions of that glorious character. Burnet tells us, that nothing
tended to reconcile the English nation to the government of King
William so much as the care he took to fill the vacant bishoprics with
men who had attracted the public esteem by their learning, eloquence,
and piety, and above all, by their known moderation in the state. With
you, in your purifying revolution, whom have you chosen to regulate
the Church? M. Mirabeau is a fine speaker, and a fine writer, and a
fine--a very fine man; but, really, nothing gave more surprise to
everybody here than to find him the supreme head of your ecclesiastical
affairs. The rest is of course. Your Assembly addresses a manifesto to
France, in which they tell the people, with an insulting irony, that they
have brought the Church to its primitive condition. In one respect their
declaration is undoubtedly true: for they have brought it to a state of
poverty and persecution. What can be hoped for after this? Have not
men, (if they deserve the name,) under this new hope and head of the
Church, been made bishops for no other merit than having acted as
instruments of atheists? for no other merit than having thrown the
children's bread to dogs? and, in order to gorge the whole gang of
usurers, peddlers, and itinerant Jew discounters at the corners of streets,
starved the poor of their Christian flocks, and their own brother pastors?
Have not such men been made bishops to administer in temples in
which (if the patriotic donations have not already stripped them of their

vessels) the church-wardens ought to take security for the altar plate,
and not so much as to trust the chalice in their sacrilegious hands, so
long as Jews have assignats on ecclesiastic plunder, to exchange for the
silver stolen from churches?
I am told that the very sons of such Jew jobbers have been made
bishops: persons not to be suspected of any sort of Christian
superstition, fit colleagues to the holy prelate of Autun, and bred at the
feet of that Gamaliel. We know who it was that drove the
money-changers out of the temple. We see, too, who it is that brings
them in again. We have in London very respectable persons of the
Jewish nation, whom we will keep; but we have of the same tribe
others of a very different description,--housebreakers, and receivers of
stolen goods, and forgers of paper currency, more than we can
conveniently hang. These we can spare to France, to fill the new
episcopal thrones: men well versed in swearing; and who will scruple
no oath which the fertile genius of any of your reformers can devise.
In matters so ridiculous it is hard to be grave. On a view of their
consequences, it is almost inhuman to treat them