"If Christian Preachers had continued to teach as Christ & his Apostles did, without Salaries, and as the Quakers now do, I imagine [religious] Tests [for state officers] would never have existed: For I think they were invented not so much to secure Religion itself, as the Emoluments of it.--When a Religion is good, I conceive that it will support itself; and when it cannot support itself, and God does not take care to support, so that its Professors are oblig'd to call for help of the Civil Power, 'tis a Sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one. But I shall be out of my Depth if I wade any deeper in Theology..."
---- Benjamin Franklin (1780) (on the Massachusetts Constitution)
--- extracted from The Founding Fathers and the Debate Over Religion in Revolutionary America
words in [square brackets] by DeluSion.
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