If anything were wanting to this necessary operation of the form of
government, religion would have given it a complete effect. Religion,
always a principle of energy, in this new people is no way worn out or
impaired; and their mode of professing it is also one main cause of this
free spirit. The people are Protestants; and of that kind which is the
most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion. This is a
persuasion not only favourable to liberty, but built upon it. I do
not think, Sir, that the reason of this averseness in the dissenting
churches, from all that looks like absolute government, is so much to be
sought in their religious tenets, as in their history. Every one knows
that the Roman Catholic religion is at least coeval with most of the
governments where it prevails; that it has generally gone hand in hand
with them, and received great favour and every kind of support from
authority. The Church of England, too, was formed from her cradle, under
the nursing care of regular government. But the dissenting interests
have sprung up in direct opposition to all the ordinary powers of the
world; and could justify that opposition only on a strong claim to
natural liberty. Their very existence depended on the powerful and
unremitted assertion of that claim. All Protestantism, even the most
cold and passive, is a sort of dissent. But the religion most prevalent
in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance;
it is the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant
religion.