(January 12, 1729–July 9, 1797), was an English orator, author and leader in Great Britain during the time of the Revolutionary War. On March 22, 1775, in his 2 Edmund Burke addressed Parliament, saying:
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 favorable to Liberty, but built upon it. …
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.685
Freedom and not servitude is the cure of anarchy; as religion, and not atheism, is the true remedy for superstition.686
I have been told by an eminent bookseller, that in no branch of his business, after tracts of popular devotion, were so many books as those on law exported to the Plantations. … I hear that they have sold nearly as many of Blackstone’s Commentaries in America as in England.687
In The Works and Correspondence of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke, Volume VI, Edmund Burke stated:
The Scripture is no one summary of doctrines regularly digested, in which a man could not mistake his way; it is a most remarkable, but most multifarious, collection of the records of the Divine economy; a collection of an infinite variety of theology, history, prophecy, psalmody, morality, allegory, legislation, carried through different books, by different authors, at different ages, for different ends and purposes.688
In his work, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke wrote in 1790:
People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.689
In 1791, Edmund Burke stated in “A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly”:
What is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without restraint.
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as they are disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good in preference to the flattery of knaves.
Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.
It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.690
On May 28, 1794, in the Impeachment of Warren Hastings, Edmund Burke stated:
There is but one law for all, namely, that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity—the law of nature, and of nations.691
On January 9, 1795, in a letter to William Smith, Edmund Burke made the statement:
All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.692
In 1797, in his Letters on a Regicide Peace, Edmund Burke wrote:
The blood of man should never be shed but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for our kind. The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.693
Edmund Burke resigned himself, stating:
First, according to the ancient, good, and laudable custom, of which my heart and understanding recognize the propriety, I bequeath my soul to God, hoping for His mercy through the only merits of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.694