largest possible amount of individual liberty? We are not speaking now of the Christianity that is a principle and a sentiment of individual bosoms, but of the Christianity that interferes with us in our civil relations, and has made itself an active element in the influences of Government.

Religion, as it is made to affect us by the State, is felt principally as an interference with our natural Rights, and a creator of social inequalities, as much at variance with the true spirit of Religion, as with the fundamental principles of Civil Government. We are again reminded of how strangely our State Religion opposes itself to all the Church Emblems of the Scriptures. One of Christ's Emblems of the brotherhood of his Church was the exalting of the valleys, and the levelling of the hills,—but the National Christianity erects artificial mountains, and sinks artificial valleys; and by appointing a test or standard, according to which every man's faith is to be tried, with privileges attached to conformity on Earth, and promises of Heaven, has at once destroyed the Christian and the Civil equality of Man, confounding two subjects so fundamentally distinct as our civil relationships as members of Society, and our spiritual relationships as members of a celestial and immortal Community.

That Religion as brought into connexions with us by the State has some tasteful and some beneficial aspects we have no wish to deny. Our hearts are as open as any, at least we desire them to be so, to all those picturesque features which give it its chief hold on the sentiments of the many. We are not insensible to the venerableness of its historical associations, (though even these are rather derived by imagination from the dimness of the solemn past, than borne out by the details of Church history,) to the grand and captivating idea of a vast Spiritual Association using the noblest description of power for the noblest purposes, nor to the touching imagery of a wide-spread religious union unbroken by dissent, of pastoral devotedness and village churches. We do not even deny that the fixedness of the Nation's Religion, its steadfast immutability amidst the flow of mortal things, may adapt it to a very important portion of our Nature and its wants, and in many of our states of perishable circumstance may have a solemn as well as picturesque effect. At the same time, while desiring to combine these tasteful and solemn associations with all the administrations of Religion, we protest against sacrificing anything of the higher principle and substance of Conscience, of Freedom, and of Truth, for the sake of these sentimental and poetical effects, highly as we rate their influence, and willingly as we would carry them along with us. We love religious Unity, but we will not have it at the sacrifice of individual liberty.

We love, as much as others, the dim and solemn Edifice, vast and undefined, an image of the Temple not made with hands, but we will not enter it, if we must bend our free necks, and sacrificing conscience to Taste, forego the Worship of the Spirit and the Truth for the sake of an artistical influence. We must have these spiritual aids, mighty as we know them to be, in intimate fellowship with our nobler rights, and not as compensations for their abandonment. Worthy adornments of the Temple of Liberty, and fitting emblems of its vast spirit, they lose all grandeur in our sight when presented to us as the accompaniments of our vassalage. Much as we love religious peace, much as we revolt from sectarian agitation, and from all the monstrous exhibitions of spiritual enmities for the love of God, much as we cherish the idea of a true Christian Union, yet satisfied as we are that this union must grow out of right principles, or speedily be dissolved, we may not barter substantial rights for adventitious influences, nor extinguish the progressive elements of the religious principle for the sake of a hollow and nominal peace,not the activity of varied yet harmonious life, but the stillness of an outward and unreal uniformity. There is nothing we desire so much as a true union of the Christian Church; a union of all hearts in the love of goodness upon earth, and in the hope of the realizations of good in heaven;-a union to be made out of the estimates, and affinities and tendencies of the heart, and not out of the definitions and logical accuracies of the head ;- -a union growing out of a harmony of spirit, a temper of love, a common direction of the affections towards objects of immortal interest, and not out of a sameness of opinion upon subjects not capable of being verbally defined, and too vast and spiritual to be reduced to limited and unchanging propositions.

But this union in the love of God, and the pursuit of goodness, and the practical study of Christ's perfection, the National Religion instead of regarding as a thing to be desired, deprecates and dreads as a thing most dangerous. National Education the National Christianity refuses to have, because it is connected with a religious union, not of opinions, but of affections. The Nation's Religion interferes to prevent the Nation's Education, rather than that the children of the community should unite together for a few hours on the principles of practical piety and practical duty, though they afterwards may separate to be taught doctrines and creeds to any extent that the priest or the parent may desire. The Nation's Religion will not tolerate the exhibition of a few hours' harmony and combined instruction, though an after hour is provided for herself, to work her own works of separation, and infuse the elements of division and spiritual

strife. The Church, and the Nation's Christianity will not endure the sight of children dwelling peaceably together, receiving instructions in the works and the will and the ways of God— the religious ground of their union being practical devotion to their heavenly Father, and the precepts and the life of Christ. Such an exhibition threatens the dissolution of Society in the eyes of Ecclesiastics. If a school may be conducted on such a religious basis of union, why not a Church,-and then what becomes of Creeds and Priests? If children may receive religious instruction on their spiritual relations to God, and the moral applications of Christ's example, without a word being said of rival sects, why might not men unite together on the same broad principles of religious agreement; and then what becomes of all that array of intimidations by which spiritual tyranny creates fears, and then works upon them to evil and unhappy issues? The sectarian temper of the Nation's Religion will not even be appeased by the ample indulgence shown to it in that provision by which the Clergyman and the Priest and the Minister were to be permitted before the day closed, each to seize upon his own share of the tender mind of childhood, and to fill them, if so it pleased him, not with the love of God but with the distinctions of creeds, not with a love of man but with a hatred of heresy, not with the spirit of peace but with the spirit of disunion. It is of the essence of all dogmatical Churches not to admit the possibility of union upon any basis except that of certain opinions held by themselves. To justify their own existence they must defend this exclusive principle. If a religious union is possible and safe on any other principles, if there may be a union of pure hearts in the simple, earnest love of Christ's goodness, and of Christ's God-then how could they justify their own restrictions, exclusiveness and narrow Church Constitution? And if Adults must belong to a certain Church in order that Christ may be enabled to save them, the same rule must apply to Children, and no wider principle of religious union must ever be permitted to enter their minds, and endanger their salvation. Thus argues the Nation's Religion. Perish popular Instruction, rather than that sect should be seen standing by sect in brotherly love! If such things are possible with children, the habit may remain with them when they become men. Perish popular Intelligence, but let the principles of Sectarianism receive no shock by children living lovingly together, even though they are to be separated into doctrinal divisions, and marshalled under their leaders, before the day expires! Let gross darkness cover the people, if some one sect is not permitted to lord it over all the rest! Perish secular knowledge, and practical religion, and all the

blessings of Mental and Moral Discipline, and the strong bonds of youthful intercourse, affectionate and pure, and all the humanities of Education-perish all without a sigh, rather than that party religionists should make the suicidal confession, that there can be any safe and Christian union, even of children, without a creed! If there is a sight at which angels weep in despair, and which plucks the hopeful heart out of good men upon earth, it is the spectacle of the Nation's Religion interfering to destroy the Nation's Education-Religion waging a war against knowledge-Religion struggling for the perpetuation of the Nation's darkness-Religion striving as for her own life that our sects should lose nothing of their uncharitableness-Faith in God and in Heaven made the instrument to prevent all improvement in man, all peace on earth! "Let us go to heaven, ignorant as were our fathers," says one of the Petitions to the House of Commons, " rather than go to hell as philosophers." And if such was the alternative, we should not object. But little can there be of the heavenly similitude in any state of society, where such principles and sentiments, not only exist but prevail; not only have a voice, but make that voice dominant in the deliberative Council of the Nation.

We could wish, if possible, without entering into the secular motives or any of the mixed sources of action of the parties concerned, to discover the precise objection of the Nation's Religion to the Nation's Education. It is not an opposition to all Education, for nothing so monstrous as this has yet been avowed. All parties profess to be friends to popular Instruction, provided they are permitted so to regulate it, as to secure certain ecclesiastical purposes, and to uphold, in unabated action, the existing principles of ecclesiastical Institutions. Knowledge and Education they hold to be good, provided it does not interfere with something that they hold to be better. The chief good they consider to be correctness of religious opinions, an orthodox belief, a peculiar set of doctrinal ideas, and provided they can secure this, they would sacrifice any advantage, however great, that could be supposed by any possibility to endanger it. Knowledge is not to them the chief good; neither is Morality; nor practical Religion, considered apart from their doctrinal sources;-but their own peculiar creed with its own peculiar fruits. Any thing that interferes with this, that alters in any respect this speculative and logical faith, though it was the science of Newton, the profound moral wisdom of Locke, the heaven of Milton's heart, they would regard as pure evil, against which all minds, but especially the young, the rising supply of the Churches, are by every means

to be protected. Science, Philosophy, and Heavenly Beauty, are only agents of destruction, turning away men's hearts from God, if it should be found that they modify in any thing the statutes of opinion, the adjustments of the Confession or the Creed. Education then they will consent to have only with securities that Knowledge shall not be allowed to open the blind eye of Faith, and that the Church or the Creed shall lose no followers. Educate if you will, but first enter into pledges that the new ideas introduced into fresh and eager minds, shall break no Church fetter, and remove no Church prejudice. Educate if you will, but first make provision that the religious results shall be exactly what certain men wish them to be, and without which they believe your Education to be only a curse. Educate if you will, but first enter into the most solemn engagements, that Education shall not qualify the mind to form its religious opinions freely and for itself, that Education shall be used to keep the religious convictions imprisoned, and to lead down by necessary steps, impassable enclosures, and fenced ways, into the safe places of Orthodoxy.

This idea of the essential necessity of certain opinions to secure salvation, by which is meant "deliverance from eternal sufferings," for a "moral salvation," it is not denied that heretics may have, this idea, the root of all sects and strifes in Religion is, unfortunately, not accompanied by an unfearing faith that Truth is mighty and will prevail, that the Creed which is to save will be made more manifest by the advancing lights of knowledge, and may safely be left unprotected to produce conviction by its own Evidences. Obstinate as to the necessity of faith in a particular Creed to secure Salvation, the Nation's Christianity has yet no faith in the Creed itself, as being sufficient for its own protection, as shining by its own light, and requiring only an improved knowledge in the Community, to be more justly understood, and more willingly received. With the utmost confidence in the indispensableness of some dogma, the Nation's Religion unites the utmost distrust of that dogma, of its power to maintain itself, to live by its own life, to prevail by the pure power of truth. It has no faith in the inherent vitality of the Creed, in its self-manifesting and self-protecting energy,-and no appreciation of the vast importance of the freshness and reality of individual conviction. The Creed, not the fresh and living faith of pure hearts and earnest minds, the Creed is the sole instrument of Safety;-its are the ideas which God requires to exist in every mind that can be saved, and to leave such an instrument to work its own way under the pretence of encouraging free thought, and nourishing the mighty energies of indivi