Lord Sidmouth’s Six Acts fifty years later, we may be inclined to class such a constitution among the most inadequate and mischievous political arrangements that any free country has ever had to endure.  Yet it was this which Burke declared that he looked upon with filial reverence.  “Never will I cut it in pieces, and put it into the kettle of any magician, in order to boil it with the puddle of their compounds into youth and vigour; on the contrary, I will drive away such pretenders; I will nurse its venerable age, and with lenient arts extend a parent’s breath.”

[Footnote 1:  Present Discontents.]

[Footnote 2:  Reflections on the French Revolution.]

He was filled with the spirit, and he borrowed the arguments, which have always marked the champion of faith and authority against the impious assault of reason or innovation.  The constitution was sacred to him as the voice of the Church and the oracles of her saints are sacred to the faithful.  Study it, he cried, until you know how to admire it, and if you cannot know and admire, rather believe that you are dull, than that the rest of the world has been imposed upon.  We ought to understand it according to our measure and to venerate where we are not able presently to comprehend.  Well has Burke been called the Bossuet of politics.

Although, however, Burke’s unflinching reverence for the constitution, and his reluctance to lay a finger upon it, may now seem clearly excessive, as it did to Chatham and his son, who were great men in the right, or to Beckford and Sawbridge, who were very little men in the right, we can only be just to him by comparing his ideas with those which were dominant throughout an evil reign.  While he opposed more frequent parliaments, he still upheld the doctrine that “to govern according to the sense, and agreeably to the interests, of the people is a great and glorious object of government.”  While he declared himself against the addition of a hundred knights of the shire, he in the very same breath protested that, though the people might be deceived in their choice of an object, he “could scarcely conceive any choice they could make, to be so very mischievous as the existence of any human force capable of resisting it."[1] To us this may seem very mild and commonplace doctrine, but it was not commonplace in an age when Anglican divines—­men like Archbishop Markham, Dr. Nowell or Dr. Porteus—­had revived the base precepts of passive obedience and non-resistance, and when such a man as Lord Mansfield encouraged them.  And these were the kind of foundations which Burke had been laying, while Fox was yet a Tory, while Sheridan was writing farces, and while Grey was a schoolboy.

[Footnote 1:  “To the Chairman of the Buckinghamshire Meeting,” 1780.]