Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/466

456 suffer the priest to govern him. Besides, true religion will not do the work of tyranny, like an heated and beguiled Imagination. Tyranny wants persecutors, not advocates of truth and virtue; to gain these, it makes gods and religions. Is tyranny able by its laws to bring the King of Heaven down to earth, and convert him into its instrument? If tyranny cannot coerce the true God, into an instrument of its vices, then the gods it uses must be false.

The same governments and hierarchies, which eulogize Daniel in their prayers, imitate Nebuchadnezzar in their actions; they set up dogma for his image; and pains, penalties or tythes for his furnace. The Spaniard who reads of this furnace with horrour, dances at an auto de fe with transport. And the governments which erect the modern furnace. contrived to consume without fire, believe the dogma, for the sake of which they harrass and torture mankind, as faithfully as the Babylonian did the divinity of his image.

Although the atheism of images, has been less mischievous than the atheism of dogma, the additional malignity of the latter, is only an exacerbation of the same principle. It is as presumptuous in you, to require me to worship the manufacture of your head as of your hands; your imaginary or solid idol; and it would be wicked in me to do either. But there is less tyranny and impiety in worshipping the solid image, because the mind has a refuge in its emblematical nature. Had Henry, Mary and Elizabeth, set up solid images, by a Babylonical proclamation, containing a disclosure of the power of mental substitution, many martyrs to polemical dogma, would have escaped the flames.

When a government usurps a power of legislating between God and man, it proves itself to be an atheist. If it believed there was any God, it would be conscious of the vice and folly of making one; if it believed there was any revelation, it would see the vice and folly of construing it by laws, which are not revelation; if it is believed that God made man, it would acknowledge that man could not make God.