have not hitherto been very well understood, in a new and clearer light; but so far as we can come at the results of his Inquiry, he merely makes "confusion worse confounded.”

Who the author of this book is we know not; but, be he who he may, we should like to know his name, that we might give him an immortality, which he has not secured to himself by this production. He belongs to the "Blue Ruin" party, both in politics and religion. He is a genuine croaker, though somewhat cunning, and withal, capable of croaking in a tolerable voice, and is less disagreeable than most of his family connexions. Our country, to believe him, is assuredly ruined; the altars of religion are all desecrated; pestilential heresies are rife in the land; Socinians and Jews, and even Unbelievers, vote, and are sometimes voted for; and the awful visitations of God's wrath cannot be delayed much longer. One may almost fancy him a second Jonah, lately disgorged from some whale's belly, come to denounce divine judgments upon another Nineveh. The good people of America, it is devoutly hoped, may take warning and repent, ere the "forty days" be run out.

The sum of all his complaints is, he tells us, "that one way or another, that religion, which has given. us a name among the states of Christendom, and which many of us deem essential to our future wellbeing, as a people, is everywhere politically set at nought; regarded as an outlaw to the institutions of the country; a feather in the scale of its interests; as useless, if not discreditable in public life; and in reference to the elective sovereignty itself not to be thought of!" Surely this is a grievous complaint. But on what facts does the author rest for its justification? And what kind of political recognition of religion does he demand?

The facts, which justify the complaint, and prove all here set forth, are: 1st. President Jefferson refused to appoint a fast when some of his political opponents wanted one, for the purpose of fasting over some of

his political sins, and alleged in his own defence, that he could not find any power delegated to him by the constitution of the United States, authorizing him to interfere with religious doctrines, institutions, discipline, or exercise. 2dly. The refusal on the part of General Jackson to appoint a fast, to keep off the cholera, when certain religious people requested him to do it. 3dly. The assertion of a United States Senator, that a reference to the Bible, in the Senate, as authority, was not fortunate, that book not being the statute book of that body. 4thly. The refusal on the part of Congress to stop the Mail from running on Sunday. 5thly. The fact, that the New York Legislature, during its last session, refused to appoint a chaplain. 6thly. The fact, that the Legislature of pious Connecticut debated the question, whether they would not do the same. 7thly. Electors do not inquire whether candidates for office are orthodox or not, and orthodox electors do sometimes vote for anti-orthodox, or heterodox candidates.

These are the facts which justify his complaint, and authorize him to call our government an irreligious one. What would he have as a remedy for the evil? What kind of connexion between religion and politics does he demand? A union of church and state? No; that is not to be thought of. Have the state become the servant of the church? Most likely; but he does not say so. Have the state decree a body of Divinity, which all must embrace, a ritual all must observe? No. What then? Enact that the Bible is the holy word of God; that no man who does not profess to believe it shall be eligible to any office; that to deny the existence of God, the truth of the doctrine of the Trinity, or the inspiration of the Old and New Testaments, is blasphemy, to be punished as a criminal offence; to prohibit by strong penal enactments all profane swearing, and all sabbath-breaking, and to appoint fasts whenever the clergy or the church say the occasion demands them. The author of the book contends that ours is a

Christian commonwealth, and therefore infers that all which comes or may come under the denomination of Christian ethics should be legally enforced. He divides Christianity into two parts, Ecclesiastical Christianity and the Ethics of Christianity. The first belongs exclusively to the church, which is a body. distinct from all civil polity, and raised infinitely above the reach of the civil legislature; it asks and will submit to no civil protection or control. The ethics of Christianity are binding on legislatures, and are proper objects of legislation; it is the duty of civil governments to respect them and to cause them to be respected.

That the government of this country is a Christian government, is inferred from the fact, that in no case is it positively declared not to be. The constitution of the United States repudiates some of the abuses of Christianity, but says nothing against Christianity itself. The first settlers of this country were Christians, and in nearly all cases designed to found a Christian commonwealth, and did found one. Nearly all the state constitutions originally recognised Christianity, and the greater part of them do it even now. Christianity is part and parcel of the common law of England, [doubted,] which was brought here by our fathers, and which is still in force. The majority are Christians; and as the majority have an absolute right to rule, it follows that they have a right to form a Christian commonwealth, and to insist upon Christianity as the religion of the government. Moreover, in practice, the government in all its branches, saving the cases of Presidents Jefferson and Jackson, the majority of the committee on Sabbath mails, the New York legislature, in dispensing with a chaplain, has always recognised Christianity, and respected it as the religion of the country.

Ours being a Christian commonwealth, it follows that our government must regard Christian ethics as its own, and that it can have no right to introduce Pagan, Jewish, or Mahometan ethics; and it also

follows that none but Christians can really be citizens or members of the commonwealth. Governments are instituted to protect rights, not to create them; and its mission is to protect the rights of all its citizens. For this end the American government was instituted. It was instituted by Christians to nurse and maintain their rights as Christians. Christians did not institute it for Unbelievers, Socinians, and Jews, but for themselves. Its functionaries are then under no obligation to consult the prejudices, beliefs, or pretended consciences of these. These have no rights in a Christian commonwealth; and if they choose to live in one must take up with such franchises as Christians choose to grant them.

This, then, is the amount of freedom secured to us, or designed to be secured to us, by our boasted. free institutions. It is freedom to Christians but to none others. The people here comprise not the whole population, but the Christian majority. Christians are the favored class. The rest are out of the pale of citizenship, are denied to have any rights, and are reduced to virtual slavery, liable at any moment to be prosecuted and punished as criminals. This is the doctrine of a professed Christian, and of a pretended friend of liberty! After avowing this doctrine, he has the effrontery to say Christianity is favorable to liberty! So is Christianity favorable to liberty, but not such Christianity, not such liberty as this.

The pretence set up by some religious people, that our government is a Christian government, that our commonwealths are Christian commonwealths, deserves more than a passing notice. Mischief lurks beneath it. If it be sustained, we undergo a revolution and must bid farewell to liberty. The several states or commonwealths, which form the confederacy of the United States, are not Christian commonwealths, in the sense in which our author and those who think with him, contend they are. The design of our fathers, when first landing in this country, was not to found a Christian commonwealth. The idea that

brought them here was liberty, still more than it was religion. Their dominant idea was freedom. They wanted, and they aimed to establish, a free commonwealth. They may not have fully possessed their idea, they may not have generalized it to the extent it will bear, but nevertheless they have it from the first moment fermenting in them.

The age, in which the colonies were planted, was an age in which all great ideas appeared in a theological envelope. Our fathers wanted liberty. This was their first want. But they had no conception of a liberty worth having, not founded on justice. justice. In this they were right. Liberty is derived from justice. But justice, in their minds, was Christianity, and Christianity was their theology and church polity. Hence the reason why Christianity held the place it did in the commonwealths they founded. Their mistake was a natural one, an inevitable one in their age. It consisted merely in taking their notions of Christian ethics as their measure of natural right, instead of taking, as we do, man's innate sense of natural right, as the proper measure of Christian ethics. If they disfranchised all but Christians, it was not because they sought to found a commonwealth for Christians alone, but because they regarded all who were not Christians, either as having not as yet risen to man's estate, or as having forfeited their rights as men, and fallen into the class of the guilty. They did not know, did not admit, that men were men, and possessed of all the rights of men, though opposed to the Christian faith, and they made that crime, which is not crime; but they did not do this to secure a monopoly to those who professed to be Christians, but to secure a liberty supported on justice, an order of government founded on their highest idea of Right, and maintaining it in the state.

That the real idea of our fathers was liberty, that liberty was the dominant idea of the institutions they founded, is evident from the history of these institutions. The institutions of a nation rarely if ever