Your Lordship now indeed speaks out very plainly. Your objection, then,
is to CLERGY-TUTORS; and you think it absurd and even pernicious to
commit our noble and liberal youth to the care of churchmen. You would
rather see them in lay-hands; in the hands of philosophers, properly
so called; who, indifferent to every thing but pure truth and reason,
are in no danger of imbibing wrong principles themselves, and are
therefore under no temptation of instilling any such into the minds of
their followers.
The thought is happy, my Lord; and, if a number of these philosophers
could any where be found, I might be induced to fall into the project
of employing such only in the province of education. But, the
condition, in which truth and reason are now left, and seem likely
to continue, in this world of ours, affords little room for such
flattering expectations. An unprejudiced instructor, I doubt, is a
rarity not to be met with, I do not say in our Universities, but even
out of them: and, prejudices for prejudices, some persons may be apt to
think those of a churchman as tolerable as of any other.
But, my Lord, having no particular bias on my own mind in favour of
that order, and having something perhaps to _resent_ from several
individuals of it, it will not misbecome me to hazard a word or two, in
its vindication.
You will permit me then to say, that I see no peculiar unfitness in
the clergy for the office, they are called to, in this country, of
superintending the business of education. The leisure they enjoy;
the various learning and general studies, which that leisure enables
them, and their profession obliges them, to pursue; and, lastly, the
strictness of life and manners, or, if you will, the very decorum,
which their character imposes upon them; these circumstances seem
generally to have marked them out, as the properest persons to form
the manners and cultivate the minds of youth, in all countries. In our
_own_, that propriety strikes one the more, since their prejudices, of
whatever kind, are but in common to them with other speculative and
studious men; and since even their interest, rightly understood, and
as seen by the best and wisest of themselves, (whatever may have been
warmly and passionately said by some persons) is in no degree separate
from that of the great community, to which they belong.