The love of truth, virtue, and the happiness of mankind are specious pretexts, but not the inward principles that set divines at work; else why should they affect to abuse human reason, to disparage natural religion, to traduce the philosophers as they universally do?

The fawning courtier and the surly squire often mean the same thing,--each his own interest.

The same principles which at first view lead to skepticism, pursued to a certain point, bring men back to common sense.

God is a being of transcendent and unlimited perfections: his nature therefore is incomprehensible to finite spirits.

To me it seems that liberty and virtue were made for each other. If any man wish to enslave his country, nothing is a fitter preparative than vice; and nothing leads to vice so surely as irreligion.

To be a good patriot, a man must consider his countrymen as God's creatures, and himself as accountable for his acting towards them.

I do not deny the existence of material substance merely because I have no notion of it, but because the notion of it is inconsistent, or in other words, because it is repugnant that there should be a notion of it.