Benjamin Franklin in a letter to Richard Price

"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 the help of the Civil Power, it is a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one."

Benjamin Franklin, in a letter to Richard Price. October 9, 1790.

Read the text of this letter at the University of Chicago Press