insurmountable, and yet it must be done, or you inevitably run foul of conscience again, in requiring that portion of the community which has the most property, and perhaps the fewest children. to contribute to instruction in doctrines which they dislike and may regard as fraught with evil. The Christian would resist the application of money, raised in this way from his means, to the support of infidel schools; unless his conscience were quieted in knowing that an equal amount was replaced from the taxes of this latter section of the community.

Thirdly, if each sect raised its own funds, this would, in fact, be a departure from the system of public to one of private education; & the whole subject would pass altogether out of the limits of my argument, or dissertation, as you please to call it. This, moreover, is not at all what you want, and should it prevail, would deprive you at once of all your most valued topics of agitation, in regard to your filched vested rights.

There remains a fourth and most serious difficulty, which I will briefly state before closing this part of my surrejoinder. It would arise from the impossibility of limiting or defining the words, sect and denomination, however easy it may seem to some of our political orators and spouters in school conventions. You, sir are very careful to say nothing about the infidel or atheist; and yet you must have seen that all your reasoning and interpretations of the consiitution, if correct, must have applied to them as well as to any other. You say nothing about the Mahometan, although your ally of the Tribune has gone one step farther than yourself and brought in the Jew. Now, sir, on your doctrine, a company of Mussulmen, landing in this asylum of the oppressed, would have at once a right to demand a conformity in our school system to their circumstances. It must be modified by every such accession to our population, and they would at once have a right to demand either a portion of the public funds for teaching the doctrines of the Prophet, or else that the Koran should be read in the schools as well as the Bible,-or that the latter should be entirely excluded, and all our lives of Mohammed suppressed.

The infidel certainly belongs to a religious sect-odd as the language may seem to some. The term simply refers to certain dogmas about religion, whether of a positive or a negative kind, and not at all to the piety of those to whom it is applied. In this sense it includes also the atheist. I believe that our courts would limit the term as found in our statute book to Christian sects, but evidently on very different grounds from those on which your reasoning is founded. Your doctrine of

abstract rights, together with your denial of any predominant religion, would take them all in.

The difficulties in this entangled hedge of thorns increase as we advance. There are far more sects than is generally supposed, and the number is increasing every day. Every thinking mind is aware of the difficulty, if not impossibility, of distinguishing the limits of political, moral, and religious dogmas. None but the most shallow intellects would ever think of regarding them as entirely separate. This being the case, what a boundless prospect, beset on every side by the most perplexing entanglements, spreads out before us? There is a sect arising who assert that they conscientiously regard the holding of property at least in land-to be wrong, and opposed either to the law of nature or to the Divine intentions, There are those who believe it would be better to break up "the isolated family relation," and live in groups and phalanxes, in which each woman shall have besides a husband, a favorite and a genitor-although it must be confessed that these extreme esoteric doctrines of the founder of this sect are not yet fully carried out by his less perfect disciples in this country. Again we have a sect of a most peculiar kind-holding doctrines. which, though apparently political, have a most intimate connection with religion, because they deny those fundamental sanctions which it lends to law and morals. This sect hold that crime is to be cured, not punished. They reject all punishment in the established sense of the word, although it may yet exist in their vocabulary. In their view there should be nothing penal in government, and they are very much opposed to all versions of the Bible, (be they Romish or Protestant,) which will teach, notwithstanding all their learned commentaries, that the murderer should be put to death-and this on the same principle according to which the sect who are named before them should consistently be opposed to all versions which contain the seventh commandment. Now, sir, to mention no more of these new denominations, which in this hyper-transcendental age are multiplying so rapidly, are you willing-I appeal to you as a minister of religion-are you willing that all these sects for sects they are--should have schools for instruction in their peculiar religious or irreligious tenets; and that, too, drawn from public funds? I have examined this matter carefully, and I defy you to find a flaw in the reductio ad absurdum to which your sectarian theory is reduced.

Yes, sir, say what you will, there is something predominant which presides over this moral and mental chaos, and which

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looms up as an ark of safety over these troubled waters. ark to which, with God's help. we will cling, as long as the least particle of hope remains (and those hopes are strong) that it will outride the storms which you, sir, and others, are endeavoring to raise. This ark is the Christian religion, contained in no established or unestablished form of ecclesiastical polity, but in that Bible which our fathers loved, and which almost all the present generation have been taught to regard as a faithful representation, in our native tongue, of the Word of God. Neither you, sir, nor your allies of the opposite pole, may be able to comprehend how there may be a "national religion without an established Church.” You are both involved in the same difficulties on this subject, but from different causes. You, sir, have no idea of a religion without a Church, although the history of Rome has often exhibited the phenomenon of a Church without religion. They, on the other hand, have no conception of a Church as the necessary embodiment of the truth, although not of its internal essence. With these, religion is but a philosophy, and to judge from some of their speculations, a very shallow philosophy too. Hence they talk of it in their sentimental style as "something between man and his Maker," and have no conception of it as a living influence, which may pervade nations as nations, forming their predominant spirit, and without which no nation can long exist, any more than a body without a soul.

Yes, sir, I still maintain, notwithstanding any argument with which you may have met this position, that we have a national religion, however strange it may sound to the ears of some. I care not whether it is in express terms recognized in our constitution, or whether, as is the fact, the fundamental positions of the constitution itself are grounded upon it. I say again, it is something higher than the written or unwritten law. If language may be used which has been employed in reference to a subject so inferior as hardly to be named in connexion, it may be said to be a "fixed fact" in the national existence. Legislation cannot disregard or refuse to acknowledge this fact, even if it should aim at doing so. It can safely disregard no facts which form a part of the national life. It cannot be neutral. There is no truth which should be so constantly sounded in the ears of our statesmen as this. I repeat it, legislation must be for or against Christianity, I speak not now of special enactments for the support of its outward worship; but the general course and spirit of our laws must either operate steadily in giving it support and countenance in the

minds of the people, or, by an infidel jealousy, undermine its claims, and reduce us gradually and silently to the condition of an unbelieving, godless and soulless mass of heterogeneous and discordant elements. Dare you yourself assert--you are asked again--will you venture to say in plain and explicit language, that we are in our corporate capacity no more a Christian than a Mahometau or an Infidel nation?

Neither in another respect, and in reference to another great fact, can legislation be neutral. He must be a dull observer of the signs of the times who does not see that the great battle of the Reformation is again to be fought. The Protestant spirit is every where arousing itself for the combat. You, sir, whether we are grateful for it or not, have contributed, more than any other man in this country, to awake this spirit among us from its long state of lethargy. The number of those merely nominal Protestants, in appeals to whom you found your greatest strength, is daily diminishing. They are either taking a genuine Protestant ground, or they are falling into Infidelity, or so openly taking the part of Rome as to loose all the influence which their dubious position once gave them; and here, too, in this great conflict, the general course and spirit of legislation must be for or against. I refer not now to legislation on such subjects as banks or tariffs or pu blic lands, but to the higher matters of national education. If the State must make laws in regard to this, and it has been decided that it shall, it cannot disregard the fixed facts that we have been from the beginning and are yet a Protestant nation,-that Protestantism enters into the predominant and presiding sprit of our institutions,-that mighty efforts are made by foreign powers to change this character, and that a class of people are daily increasing in our midst, who, although nominally naturalized, and enjoying the privileges of citizens, still retain all the dispositions and clannish spirit of foreigners,--who are by every means sought to be hemmed in by their spiritual. guides, and thus kept from coalescing with the predominant national influences. One single sentence in your Carroll Hall harangue speaks volumes on this point. Your appeal wastnot to reason, or to argument, seeking to divest a difficult ques ion of its perplexities, but to the feelings engendered in a foreign land. You addressed them as the sons of Ireland, and called upon them to act worthy of the land to which they belonged." I know that you may put a different construction upon this in reference to the land intended; but the whole contest, and the tremendous cries that followed the exhortation, show most

clearly in what spirit it was given and received. They are the cruelest enemies of Irishmen who would thus keep them Irishmen in a foreign land; and those are their truest friends who would urge them to become Americans, not merely in name, but by cordially coalescing with all the educational institutions of the country.

This conflict then must be met. We are either to be a Protestant, a Papist, or an infidel nation; and every one that has a lingering spark of regard for the religion of our fathers should join in earnest entreaty to our legislators, that at least they do no act that may accelerate a tendency to Rome, by allowing any dishonor to be placed on that BOOK which contains, more than any paper constitution, the charter of our liberties.

"And if there be a predominant national religion (you suy) above that instrument, it would suggest the inference that the constitution itself is under its protection." I thank you, sir, for the suggestion. A thought is sometimes struggling in the mind, for the want of appropriate words to give it utterance. This was my case in respect to the idea which you have so admirably, yet so unwittingly expressed. I heartily thank you for the suggestion, and the words in which it is clothed. I could have chosen no fitter term. I accept the proposition in all the fullness of its meaning. Our constitution is under the protection of this predominant national religion. It would not long be a constitution without it. It is in itself but a poor weak thing of ink and parchment. To speak in the style of some of your transcendental friends, it is but the outward expression of the predominant national influences, or at least has no intrinsic power to maintain itself against them. Experience has sadly shown how little strength it has to withstand the assaults of will and passion, where they are sustained by appeals to popular feeling. I do then rejoice in the idea that it is under the protection of a predominant national religion, and that religion is the Christian, in the primitive form to which the Reformation has restored it. The importance of this protection may be best realized by putting the simple question-What would our constitution be, and how long would it remain, if our population was like that now contained in the pure popish countries of Rome and Naples, or exhibited the same spirit of anarchy which once prevailed in infidel France, and with which, when found among ourselves