Our education is so formed as to confirm and fix this impression. Our
education is in a manner wholly in the hands of ecclesiastics, and in
all stages from infancy to manhood. Even when our youth, leaving schools
and universities, enter that most important period of life which begins
to link experience and study together, and when with that view they
visit other countries, instead of old domestics whom we have seen as
governors to principal men from other parts, three fourths of those who
go abroad with our young nobility and gentlemen are ecclesiastics: not
as austere masters, nor as mere followers; but as friends and companions
of a graver character, and not seldom persons as well born as
themselves. With them, as relations, they most commonly keep up a close
connection through life. By this connection we conceive that we attach
our gentlemen to the Church; and we liberalize the Church by an
intercourse with the leading characters of the country.
So tenacious are we of the old ecclesiastical modes and fashions of
institution, that very little alteration has been made in them since the
fourteenth or fifteenth century: adhering in this particular, as in all
things else, to our old settled maxim, never entirely nor at once to
depart from antiquity. We found these old institutions, on the whole,
favorable to morality and discipline; and we thought they were
susceptible of amendment, without altering the ground.
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