If I do not believe as you believe, it proves that you do not believe as I believe, and that is all that it proves.

One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests.

I have as little superstition in me as any man living, but my secret opinion has ever been, and still is, that God Almighty will not give up a people to military destruction, or leave them unsupportedly to perish, who have so earnestly and so repeatedly sought to avoid the calamities of war, by every decent method which wisdom could invent. Neither have I so much of the infidel in me, as to suppose that He has relinquished the government of the world, and given us up to the care of devils.

Nothing, they say is more certain than death, and nothing more uncertain than the time of dying

To bring the matter to one point, Is the power who is jealous of our prosperity, a proper power to govern us? Whoever says, No, to this question, is an independent, for independency means no more than this, whether we shall make our own law, or, whether the king, the greatest enemy which this continent hath, or can have, shall tell us there shall be no laws but such as I like.

"Government," says Swift, "is a plain thing, and fitted to the capacity of many heads."

There is something absurd in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island.