Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind, and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect. [<i>Letter to William Bradfo… - James Madison

Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits
it for every noble enterprize, every expanded prospect.

Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprize, every expanded prospect.

The internal effects of a mutable policy are still more calamitous. It poisons the blessing of liberty itself. It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?

Besides the danger of a direct mixture of religion and civil government, there is an evil which ought to be guarded against in the indefinite accumulation of property from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by ecclesiastical corporations. The establishment of the chaplainship in Congress is a palpable violation of equal rights as well as of Constitutional principles. The danger of silent accumulations and encroachments by ecclesiastical bodies has not sufficiently engaged attention in the U.S.

Let me recommend the best medicine in the world a long journey at a mild season through a pleasant country in easy stages.