18 May 1808

I. Reasons

Ch.V. Advantages

§.9./8./ Arbitrary power ousted

In such a state of things, superior reason would go unthanked and unregarded: or if regarded at all, regarded with a degree of jealousy and ill-will proportioned to its superiority: absurdity and nonsense are venerated because self-exempted from all scrutiny: exempted by their very incomprehensibility, a treasure which receives a fresh addition, from every particle of absurdity and nonsense that comes to be added to the heap.

In the indulgences sold at one time by the spiritual Court of Rome, the Protestant beholds a licence for the practice of sin, and because he has been bred a Protestant, disapproves of it. But no vast[?] indulgence was ever more decidedly and incontestably a licence for the practice of spiritual sin, than the principle and practice of nullification is a licence to the Judge for the practice of judicial injustice. Yet by the suitor - and not only in the rank of day-labourer, but in the office of legislator, the possession and exercise of this licence is regarded not merely with indifference, but with admiration and applause with an eye of veneration seconded by a tongue of eulogy. Why? because peer as well as peasant have been bred under a creed, an article of which is that "the law is the perfection of reason", another that "every thing is as it should be."