stance favourably? Can any good come of it? and if not good, then what but evil? Politicians should think of this. And if, by the mercy of God, there is yet a portion of the people left, who are conscious of higher motives than the passing hour suggests, they also will do well to think of itand promptly a little more progress in our present course, and it may be too late to think with advantage.

CHAPTER II.

THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION EXAMINED.

SECTION I.-The Letter of the Constitution.

BEGINNING therefore at the ostensible head of the mischief, let us see in the first place, whether the federal constitution is liable, in any just view of it, to the reproach of giving countenance to unchristian politics.

The provisions of that instrument in regard to religion are but two, and those, it must be owned, of a negative character; expressing no positive favour to the subject, and only guarding against abuses. Such is the general state of the case.

Upon which two observations occur. The best things are the most conspicuously liable to abuses, and so are rather honoured than dishonoured, if either, by being furnished in advance with protection against them. And as for any argument that can be drawn from the absence of terms of posi

tive favour to religion, it will lie with equal force against agriculture, commerce, manufactures, virtue itself; for they are all under like neglect; the object of the constitution being to distribute power, not favour; to frame a government, and not to forestall and clog the administration of it by words of preconceived partiality for this or that possible subject of its future action.

But what is the precise import of the provisions in question? One of them declares "that no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification for any office or public trust in the United States ;" the other, "that "that congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." These are the words, and all of them.

And now the point to be considered is, whether these words convey a meaning, or will bear a construction, unfriendly to religion. If so, it must be for one or the other of two reasons in matter of fact either that the tests and establishments thus provided against are abuses of religious origin, or that their mischievous tendency is caused or aggravated by religious influence: for if religion neither gives rise to those abuses, nor in any way contributes to their evil consequences, then it would seem, that whoever is guilty, religion must go clear.

It is common, I believe, to speak of tests and

establishments as religious institutions. Admitting they could justly be regarded in that light, still they are not of the essence of religion, and might therefore be denounced by the constitution, and by all the world, without necessarily dragging religion itself along with them into the same disgrace. If a person were heard to rail against monasticism, or the inquisition, it would hardly prove him an infidel; he might be a good man and a christian nevertheless. Religion, and most of the institutions found in nominal connexion with it, are so entirely distinguishable and so often misjoined, that no general inference can be safely drawn from one to the other.

But the fact assumed here is as false as it is inconclusive. Tests and establishments are not religious institutions. They are the handywork of political men, designed for political uses. Involving the exercise of state power, and looking to ends of state policy, they are emphatically things of state. The church, or its friends as such, have generally no agency in creating them; much less have they any authority or resources of their own that could bring them into being. And accordingly it is not against the church or its friends that the barriers of the constitution are reared. The prohibition is directed to congress, to the law-making functionaries; men, who if not restrained, would at least be able to do that