Page:A moral and political lecture delivered at Bristol (IA moralpoliticalle00cole).pdf/23



To accomplish the great object in which we are anxiously engaged to place Liberty on her seat with bloodless hands, we have shewn the necessity of forming some fixed and determinate principles of action to which the familiarized mind may at all times advert. We now proceed to that most important point, namely, to shew what those principles must be. In times of tumult firmness and consistency are peculiary needful, because the passions and prejudice of mankind are then more powerfully excited; we have shewn in the example of France that to its want of general information, its miseries and its horrors may be attributed. We have reason to believe that a revolution in other parts of Europe is not far distant. Oppression is grievous—the oppressed feel and complain. Let us profit by the example of others; devastation has marked the course of most revolutions, and the timid assertors of Freedom equally with its clamorous enemies, have so closely associated the ideas, that they are unable to contemplate the one, disunited from the other. The evil is great, but it may be averted—it has been a general, but it is not therefore a necessary consequence. In order to avert it, we should teach ourselves and others habitually to consider, that truth wields no weapon, but