“Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched.”

1810s, Letter to H. Tompkinson (AKA Samuel Kercheval) (1816)
Context: Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to it and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading; and this they would say themselves were they to rise from the dead.