could be devised. We see not how there can be any escape from this conclusion even on the lower hypothesis which our argument required, but which we have wronged these good men in adopting on their behalf, instead of supposing them to have had supreme reference to religion, as an end, and not as a means to something below itself. Would they not be bound, on this supposition, to keep out all influences foreign or hostile to the acquisition of those habits and those principles; or, in other words, to keep out atheism and infidelity with far more rigor than they would exercise towards the man who injured the present physical health by poisoning wells, or by the sale of bad provisions? And that, too, if they should choose thus to regard it, on physical grounds; because the one produces a physical mischief, comparatively partial, temporary, and easily remedied, while the other gives birth to an evil ever tending to reproduce itself, and to render all prevention of itself and its temporal consequences more and more difficult, until this moral pestilence has caused the final destruction of that physical system into which it is allowed to eat like a canker." Now suppose that there should come into their society an avowed atheist, claiming free discussion, and contending that he has the same right to inculcate his sentiments that another has to circulate the pious and religious tract. To state the case in the most favorable light, let us imagine him no vulgar, scoffing blasphemer, but one who assumes to make use of serious philosophical argument. In the light of the above principles, what must be the reply of those whose retreat is thus invaded? Might they not say to him-Here is no absolute right in the case. Your right to discuss matters of this nature must depend on the right or wrong, the good or bad tendencies of the matters themselves. We refuse to listen to you ourselves, and we forbid your speaking to our children. We say this as heads of single families, and as the civil guardians of associated families. You are a worse offender, even against the physical good of society, than the man we have punished for selling unwholesome provisions, and that, too, not on the ground that you are directly destroying the moral health of the soul: this position we might take, but we would rather place ourselves on one that comes nearer to the standard of your own right and

wrong. Your doctrine, in its ultimate effects, as we conceive, would be the means of multiplying the number of those who would be reckless of man's physical good; and your poison for the soul would exhibit its final effect in the destruction of the body. We forbid your teaching our children that there is no God. If guilty of disobedience in this respect, we banish you from our State; and if, under pretence of maintaining your rights of conscience, you persist in returning and committing the offence, we shall visit you with such sorer punishments as the wickedness and most destructive consequences of your crime may seem to us to deserve. Our children, at all events, must be protected from the danger of atheism. If you tell us that

error may safely be indulged, provided reason is left free to combat it," we are willing to run no such risk, any more than we would permit you to introduce among us a pestilential disease, if it were in our power to prevent it, simply because there may possibly exist among us the means of cure. Besides, we are not so certain that, in the present state of the human race, reason, and religion, and virtue would gain as favorable a hearing in the minds of the young, when left to themselves, as the allurements of vice and licentious pleasure, aided by the powerful auxiliary doctrine that there is no God, and, of course, no accountability. Would not these men reason correctly? Taking their circumstances, as we have stated them, can there be discovered any fallacy whatever in their premises, or the conclusion to which they are supposed to

have arrived?

Aha! says our man of human rights, who has been " watching for our halting," we knew we should catch you at last. Your disguise is off. With all your display of candor, and show of argument; with all your circumlocutions, your cautious and indirect approaches to a subject you would not dare to face directly, we have all along well known where you would finally come out. It seems then, you are for reviving blue laws, and persecuting men for their religious opinions. You would imprison, or banish, at least, if you dared not put to death, the atheist, or infidel, or blasphemer, or by whatever other name of opprobrium you may choose to designate the honest and conscientious man who denied one particle of your narrow creed.

We admit, in all seriousness, that there

is some difficulty in parrying such an attack as this, or in resisting the argument from consequences, which should apply the same reasoning, not only to atheism, but to deism, to infidelity in all its aspects, to liberalism also, to transcendentalism, together with the various shades and differences of Christian sects, until there was included everything which the most bigoted religionist might deem hostile to the true interests of mankind. We are

aware with what force all this may be retorted, by a skillful antagonist, and yet it is hard to discover the fallacy which led us, in the above case, to the odious and unpopular conclusion.

In reference to such a state of society as we have been just considering, homogeneous as to race, and of like religious faith, we cannot help regarding it as strictly and inevitably applicable. If men thus believed and felt, it would certainly be not only their duty, but their highest duty, to make the uncorrupted preservation, to their posterity, of that religion and that morality, the most sacred object of their political institutions; and we have seen that they might consistently do this on grounds that were irrespective of the interests of a future life, except so far as a regard to these latter should be employed as means for the promotion of physical good in the present world.

In maintaining such a conclusion, it might be inferred that every nation ought to be homogeneous, or, in other words, strictly a gens, and keep itself so; that it ought to have one pure religious faith, as the national soul; and that the State had become too large, or had assumed an unnatural heterogeneous and self-destructive character, when it had within its bosom different races and creeds, fundamentally varying in respect to the highest truths. The same position may also be assumed, in respect to one true and pure code of morals. It would even be applicable to a philosophy regarded as presenting the true elements of a state of well-being; and this, too, on the ground, that when differences of opinion on any subject are viewed as of no account, it must be because the subject itself has come to be regarded as one of utter indifference.

But we would frankly admit the immense difficulties that, in given circumstances, may lie in the way of reducing this fair theory to practice. We must not run into an error similar to that of

the opposing school, although in the opposite extreme, and regard as a self-evident matter of duty, what they, on the other hand, would treat as an infringement of human rights, too palpable to be discussed. It is sufficient, in the present stage of our argument, to say, that we are not such a nation as has been described. We have in all these respects most serious disorders, which, however, may ultimately be the means of great and unmingled good. The rigid doctrine laid down in our supposed case, although it may seem faultless in theory, cannot, in its full extent, or in anything like its full extent, be applied to our present state. We may lawfully make an effort to prevent the diversity becoming greater; but as at present constituted, even in our separate State polities, we resemble more a congeries of tribes, and tongues, and religions, than one single homogeneous people. We believe that there is a disposition to assimilate; that there is also, in every mixed people, if unaffected by continual outward disturbing causes, a natural tendency to nationalism in race and religion, as well as in language. We have good grounds for hoping that this feeling and love of nationality, which God has given for the highest purposes, may in timeif not sooner destroyed by them-blend into one these internal discords, and produce one common, well-attempered harmony. This must be the result, or the State is gone; for history has repeatedly shown that a nation cannot long exist composed of heterogeneous, unharmonizing elements. May we not, however, believe that something better is reserved for us, and that for some glorious finale of national harmony, Providence has brought into combination, and preserved in combination, our apparent Babel?

Whilst, however, we admit all the difficulties of our present position, there is no need so to magnify them, as to do away altogether the all-important principle for which we contend, and for which we would ever zealously contend, as the prime element of national life, never to be lost sight of or abandoned, although the difficulties were to be a thousand fold greater than they really are. We have not the homogeneity of the Puritans, either in Church or State; and yet we still have that without which no nation can long exist, any more than a body without a soul-namely, a national religion. Let no one be alarmed at this, or call up the dreaded ideas of Church and State, of

fire and faggots, with all the horrors of the Romish inquisition. We are not now discussing the question as involving merely an abstract principle; neither are we recommending any new and peculiar feature in legislation. We are dealing with matters of fact. We speak of a fixed fact, as Mr. Cushing would style it, which is fundamental even to our constitution or fundamental law, and which legislation must recognize, either by way of countenancing or opposing-a fixed fact, towards which the general course and spirit of the law cannot be neutral, even although it may never have been the subject of specific enactment in the statute book. This fact is, that we are, as yet, a Christian nation. Whatever may be our other differences, we meet on the broad ground of a common professed Christianity; not in the narrow sense of being established by law, but as forming the basis on which the law itself is established. We say this, not merely because it is the religion of a majority. We all know that it is far more. Such is its universality that there is no impropriety in calling it the creed of the nation, even on the score of numbers. But in another aspect it may with still more propriety be called the national religion. It is as yet, and notwithstanding all the efforts of infidelity and false philosophy, the quickening spirit of our institutions. It enters into the habits and modes of thinking of our people. Although very seldom mentioned in the statute book, it pervades it as an invisible spiritual atmosphere. It is recognized in the oath, in the yet prevailing ideas of punishment, in statutes against various species of immorality, and in the yet continued observance, by our legislative, judicial and executive authorities, of a sacred day. We reckon

not among these the proclamations of our governors for days of fasting and thanksgiving, nor the practice of daily prayer in our legislative assemblies. These are mere incidental matters, and do not, like the others, so enter into the very spirit of our institutions, that they cannot be removed without violent disruptions extending through the whole system. The first, by being put upon the ground of recommendations merely, would look rather like a denial of religion as being actually a part or rather the foundation of the law; and the practice and mode of appointing Congressional Chaplains from party office-seekers and on party grounds, would, unless greatly reformed, better exhibit our national Christianity in the breach than in the observance of the custom. But what is of far more account than this, Christianity furnishes the sanctions to our laws; it is taken as an avowed guide by the best of our legislators; it enters into the reasonings of our Courts, both from the bench and the bar. It is associated with our most sacred historical reminiscences. It was the avowed and cherished religion of our fathers. It has never, as yet, been repudiated by their sons. Our national existences were most certainly founded upon it as the common law of the mother country, and this foundation has never been expressly or impliedly removed by any positive legislation of an opposing kind. To speak against it, to revile it, or to attempt to bring it into disrepute, has been declared by our supreme judicial authority an offence indictable at common law, on the ground that whoever assails Christianity assails the foundations of the law itself; and that, therefore, the punishment of such a crime by the law is an act of self-defence.*

We are, then, still a religious people. We have a national creed-and we are not yet, in this respect, an exception among all other nations of ancient or modern times. That national religion is the Christian. The mere fragments of open and avowed infidel sects no more militate against this conclusion, or take away our national Christian character, than the fact that there may be a few monarchists among us should justly prevent our being styled a republican nation, or the few foreign dialects in our land should forbid the Anglo-Saxon from being regarded as our national language.

This, then, being matter of fact, not created by law, but being fundamental to the law itself (and we take the term here in its largest sense, as including not only written constitutions and statutes, but also all that enters into what may be styled the legal life or action of our political organism)-legislation, as we have said, or the general course of our government, can no more be indifferent or neutral in respect to it, than in regard to any other important national fact which enters deeply into the thoughts, feelings, customs, the inner and outer life of the great and almost universal body of the people. It is fundamental to the constitution as the constitution is fundamental to the laws. Legislation has not created this fact, as we have observed; but it is this which, in a great measure, makes legislation what it is. We may very truly say, that very few of our institutions would have been what they now are, if our ancestors, who have transmitted them to us, had not been Christians. This being so, we are, as a nation, compelled to make our choice in respect to it.

vidual, a position of indifference between religion and irreligion, or, as the issue is now made up for us, between Christianity and infidelity. It may occupy a middle ground, or a position of indifference between various sects of a common fundamental faith; especially if their differences relate not so much to those religious doctrines of national accountability, national retribution, and individual obligation, as to rights and forms and modes of worship. But this is far from being the relation of those two great antagonistic principles, which, in these latter days, are so desperately striving for the dominion of the human soul, and pressing every other influence into the conflict. These have no commonregion on which to locate the punctum indifferens. Between these there can be no peace. Eternal strife must be the law of both, until one or the other is finally made to yield; and no institution that is not utterly alien to humanity can long maintain even an apparent neutrality between them. Infidelity is not a variety, but the antithesis, of belief. It is not now even a sect of what is styled natural religion. One must be a very snperficial student of the philosophical history of the last century, not to have seen, that this has had its day, and has passed away forever. There is no more any such thing as religious or moral deism. As the smoke of former conflicts clears up, we see the two mortal foes beginning to assume their true forms, and their true positions. It is Christianity and Atheism every day taking a position of more direct antagonism, and marshaling their forces face to face. Infidelity is rapidly assuming this form of atheism, although there may be an attempt to disguise the transition under a transcendental panthe ism, or what may more appropriately be described as a seeming religious naturalism. The question is fast coming down

to this-Bible, or no Bible-Revelation, or blank irreligion. As well might we suppose a punctum indifferens, a state of indifference, or some tertium quid, between being and not-being. There never was a case to which our Saviour's declaration was more applicable-" He that is not for me is against me, and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad."

Let us carefully analyze these positions that are of late revived and put forth with so much boldness. "The law," says one, "knows no religion; the State has no concern with matters of faith." The State, then, knows no God, no retribution, and, of course, no true morality. It does not exist as a moral and responsible agent. There is, aside from the merest expediency, no real right and wrong in any of its acts. In the regulation of its conduct towards its own citizens, or towards other States, it recognizes no considerations drawn from the invisible, the eternal, and the immutable. In its highest proceedings it has relation only to the temporary, the expedient, the economical. It has nothing to do with principle. It has no conscience, no duties, no accountability; for each of these when carried out to their legitimate limits must terminate in the recognition of a spiritual and supernatural world, together with an invisible government, of which-as the fountain of all other legitimate governments the law is Eternal Truth, and the lawgiver the Eternal God.

Of all nations we most need the security to human rights, which can alone be drawn from considerations like these. Of all people on the face of the earth, we have the most need of a national conscience to regulate, and keep steady to the law of right, that sovereign power which nowhere is so absolute as among ourselves. Nothing could more strikingly show the value of this doctrine of a national accountability as a vital part of the national religion, than the manner in which the most important measures are discussed by some who would be thought to be our greatest men. We have a most clear illustration of this in a late speech delivered by one who has been a candidate for the highest and most responsible station, and who aspires to become the executive organ of the nation's will. The scene to which we refer is before that

most dignified body, which, of all others, should represent the pure and abstract reason of the State, or that "mind without passion," which the master spirit of antiquity gives as the truest definition of law. It is before that department of our national organism, where, whatever may be the fluctuating and irrational desires of the popular mass, there should ever be a communion with eternal truth and eternal righteousness-a department, which, as performing the office of head to the body, should be ever employed in keeping in order, instead of exciting, the more animal and irrational portions of the system, It is in fact before our national Bou, or assembly of wise men, our Senate, our eldership-a body supposed to be raised far above all the disturbing influences which operate on the rest of the community-a body which the people, with a wise self-distrust, are supposed to have selected to think for them, and not merely to represent their most unreasoning propensities. The orator is one of these very elders of the land, who, according to Tully's noble definition of the Legislator and the Judge, should be ever lex loquens, the speaking organ of the law and the conscience of the State. Such is the scene, and such the speaker. The subject is the awfully solemn one of war, with all the tremendous consequences that must follow a deadly strife between two of the most powerful nations on the earth. Now, what may be supposed to be the nature of this speech, and of the considerations appealed to? It is just such, we reply, as might be expected from some common haranguer addressing a democratic massmeeting in the Park. It abounds in the most trivial, yet mischievous declamation, adapted and designed to enkindle into action all the elements of party and national animosity. It addresses itself to the most animal and irrational part of our nature. It is full of appeals to our absurd and excessive national vanity. It repeats, ad nauseam, the most stale declarations of patriotism, designed only to disguise the most reckless demagoguism; and indulges, from beginning to end, in the most empty gasconade about national honor. Nowhere, however, is there the least allusion to such a thing as a national conscience, or a national moral accountability.*