A PEOPLE divided as we are, into many sects of religion, could not exist in unity, under a government of Church and State in one establishment. Sects being founded upon articles of faith and dogmas which admit of no denial, stand toward each other in a relation it may be of humane antagonism, but still of antagonism. Between Romanists and Calvinists, there is no possible amity, save on the common grounds of justice and kindness.

That the justice of God is over all men's heads, be they of what opinion they may, and that justice establishes between each man and his neighbor, without reference to any faith or creed beside the moral one, certain laws, in whose observance lies the only hope of liberty, life, and peace; this is the faith of republics, the only state religion which a free nation can allow above their heads.

This creed of the free States, which must be carefully distinguished from the creeds of Church, is derived from an observation of the moral necessities of man; the necessities of freedom, property, and hope; the necessities of peace, and progress, of security and privacy. Creeds of religion being invariably derived from a divine authority, falsely or truly interpreted, cannot change except by a new revelation, or a new interpretation of the old. The more ancient they are, the more universal their authority. Hence, it has happened, that every system of religion traces itself backward to the creation of man, and, either truly or falsely, as

VOL. III. NO. VI. NEW SERIES.

sumes the word of God for its foundation.

Creeds of State, on the contrary, advance continually toward higher principles, as they are perfected more and more by the wisdom of succeeding statesmen. A government which does not progress, declines; laws and politics become effete and useless; aristocracies give way to monarchies, and monarchies to republics. Republics, fashioned rudely at first, grow slowly to perfection, tending always toward the equalization and freedom of individuals. It is by studying the wants and aspirations of the poor, the weak, the friendless and the ignorant, that men arrive at a knowledge of the great principles of freedom, justice and progress, and not by a pedantry of legal lore or by delving in the rotten soil of metaphysics. The creation and growth of a republic resembles that of animated beings, in which every function and every organ is made to subserve the common good, and to provide for the common ends.

Educated by English writers, we find it. extremely difficult to separate in our minds the idea of a church from that of a state. Absorbed in the sublimity and terror of contemplations that reach out into the after life, we forget that divinity appears in many forms, and that the creative power, the continued and continual Providence, appears pre-eminently in the organization of nations, by the harmonizing of vast bodies of living beings in systems of government, founded upon the idea

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of justice. While religion looks forward to | the beholding of the Creator face to face, in the next life, the study of political and moral organizations shows him to us by his eternal laws, the image of his person, immediately, and in the present. It is, therefore, a pursuit not without dignity. By it we learn, how, by persuasion and influence, the freedom and the aspiring hope of one man is communicated to great numbers, until at length whole nations become intoxicated with a frenzy of freedom, subsiding, after revolution, into the calm of rational liberty; and how the most cruel and violent animosity of sects is lulled asleep by the music of free eloquence, and men who were ready to slay and devour each other for opinion's sake, meet kindly, and stand shoulder to shoulder in a strife for liberty.

Sects divide and weaken a people; laws unite and consolidate them. Religions, excepting always the true and only religion, possess each a fragment of the truth; but the great church of freedom, founded on the ideas of liberty, justice and progress, is one and indivisible, united by inviolable bands.

Religion derives the idea of justice from the voice of God, spoken in the earlier ages, and handed down by written tradition. What has come down to us through many generations, revered by all, and carefully given by the fathers to the children, must be truth; the perishable nature of falsehood, and the testimony of the wise for ages, has established the authenticity of the written Scripture, the foundation of all religions. The republic, on the contrary, derives its ideas from observation; from observation of the effects and of the violations of justice and its conrate principles. It traces the decay and ruin of nations to the violations of the rights of man, the rights of liberty, equity and progress; the right to freedom and security, the right to property and privacy, the right to progress, in the perfecting of individual happiness.

While religions, therefore, are established by authority and written traditions, through the medium of faith, insight and reverence, republics are established by necessity and experience-moral necessity and moral experience. Laws cannot be imposed by any other principle than ne

cessity-a law not dictated by the wants of the people, their moral, intellectual or physical wants, is either an unjust or an unnecessary law.

While, then, even the just and the upright are tossed in matters of faith upon a sea of conjecture, and by various innovators are led away into unbeliefs, and all varieties of false beliefs; in the one idea of human rights, of liberty, progress, and equality, they stand firm and harmoniously together, in one living and indivisible republic.

To an eye accustomed to regard only the exceptions to laws, instead of laws themselves; the imperfections of human nature instead of its grand realities; the disappointment, despair, and weakness, instead of the progress, hope and power of that moral being whose race perpetuates the image of God-to such a mind, the republic appears only an expedient, an experiment, a transition from better to worse, or from evil to equal evil.

Absorbed in contemplation of the past, of which that part only remains whose original force and value has made it imperishable, they see nothing in the present but a mass of error and confusion, a surging sea of vices and abominations; to them, an existing government is a corrupt government; virtue lies only in books and ideas; their knowledge of men is taken from historic eulogies, which recount great deeds. In the living man they see only the limbs and outward flourishes, and must wait for the pronouncing of the funeral oration, and the solemn grief of the people, before they venture to believe that any man is worthy of remembrance.

Equally incapable of discerning the present glory and majesty of the republic are those grovelling minds who engage only in the trickery and intrigue of politics, and who are the dirty tools and soiled weapons of the State which they seem to manage ; who fancy themselves guiding and urging affairs, when they are only driven along by a power over which they have no control, but by which they profit for the

season.

Nothing majestic or divine appears to either of these, in the structure and spirit of a free government. Because it is a present and an actual, an embodied and a