should form an exception? The church indeed is a thing by itself; but this is but a part of christianity; what becomes of the residue, the great principles of its moral code? Are politicians to reject these also? Have they not committed the mistake of regarding the church as equivalent to the whole system, and so rejecting the whole because the church is not to be meddled with? Can the facts of the case be otherwise accounted for? Such at any rate has been the writer's impression, and he has derived from it the chief motive for what he has done. The reader will judge of the rest. ERRATA. Page 61, line 6 from the bottom, for "sanctity" read sanity. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. NATIONS, like individuals, should endeavour to learn something from the ills they suffer. It is especially becoming in a free people, when visited with chastisement, to consider wherein they have provoked the rod, and as far as may be, to compensate their misfortunes by growing wiser and better under them. We have run into many novelties both of opinion and practice. Our fathers had no conception of some of the modern notions of what are called state-rights; and I believe they would have stood amazed at the kind of suggestion now current in the country, that a government such as they have left us, so respectful of the rights of man in every form, ought yet to be administered with as little avowed deference as possible for those of the supreme being. Priestcraft is an evil of no late discovery: the danger of formal alliances between church and state, is matter of history long and well understood: but the propriety and merit of political irreligion,- of carrying on the business of the commonwealth professedly as "without God in the world,"-this, so far as I know, is what was never openly taught and accredited till very recent times. President Jefferson was the first American teacher of this sort of doctrine. When applied to in 1807 to recommend to his fellow-citizens a day of national humiliation and prayer, he excused himself by alleging that he had not the power to do it; and he affected to maintain his dogma, then a most novel and surprising one, by argument. "I consider the government of the United States,” said he, "as interdicted by the constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises." This results not only from the provision that no law shall be made respecting an establishment of religion, but from that also which reserves to the states the powers not delegated to the United States. "Certainly," he continued, "no power to prescribe any religious exercise, or to assume authority in religious discipline, has been delegated to the general government." Whence he concludes, "it must then rest with the states." Nor has the sophistry of this reasoning made it harmless. President Jackson, after Mr. Jeffer |