of the Church of England, those who invited William III., and those who settled the crown on the house of Hanover? All innovators. Or, if the word must bear an odious sense, what is slavery, tyranny, persecution, toleration, but innovation; for "from the beginning" of civil society, or of Christianity, "it was not so." Nor is the experiment new or dangerous. The liberal toleration which this country has enjoyed for ages, is a good preparation for it, and on the continent excited the same dreadful predictions of mischief, fanaticism, and anarchy, as are repeated against the nobler system of Christian equality. In many of the American States, in Holland, the trial has been amply successful: look too at Canada; Papist and Protestant are there on equal terms; both, or neither, established or tolerated. is taxed only for his own church. The stream has here risen above the fountain, and that is given to the colony, which is denied to the parent

state.

Each

By the first article of the constitution of Pennsylvania, which is a declaration of the rights of conscience, William Penn, the Quaker, gave a new and noble example to legislators, which we hope they will one day imitate. It runs thus: "In reverence to God, the Father of lights and spirits, the author as well as object of all divine knowledge, faith and worship, I do, for

me and mine, declare and establish, for the first fundamental of the government of this country, that every person that doth or shall reside therein, shall have and enjoy the free possession of his or her faith, and exercise of worship toward God, in such way and manner as every such person shall in conscience believe is most acceptable to God. And so long as every such person useth not this Christian liberty to licentiousness, or the destruction of others, that is to say, to speak loosely or profanely or contemptuously of God, Christ, the holy Scriptures, or religion; or commit any moral evil or injury against others in their conversation; he or she shall be protected in the enjoyment of the aforesaid Christian liberty, by the civil magistrate.'

Would religious liberty hurt Christian truth, enfeeble its evidences, dim its brightness, or bound its influence? No: Christianity is injured by adventitious aid. She stands best alone. "Impos

ture is destitute of a firm foundation of its own to stand upon. However specious it may appear to be, it cannot abide the eye of the examiner. Reason revolts at it, and revelation condemns it. Its only dependence is upon something adventitious. It naturally turns its eye to political authority, and the power of the sword. Destitute of arguments, it can only force its way by sanguinary laws. These it procures, by all its own arts of fallacy and fraud, to be enacted against

E

Recusants and Dissenters. Cruel laws and preposterous measures are ever in its suit. Injustice is the foundation of its throne. Ruthless tyranny is its sceptre. Incapable of subsisting but by plunder and rapine, it robs mankind of all their rights. At its tribunals, even the rights of conscience cannot be redeemed at a less ransom than that of men's lives. In all these respects incorporations level Christianity with base imposture. Though the religion of Jesus be the only revealed religion upon earth, and is entitled to build her throne on the ruins of imposture in every possible shape; yet let it not be once said, that she ever claimed, or ever permitted any of her friends to claim, to build her kingdom on the ruins of natural justice, and the wreck of mankind's inviolable rights! Let none, either of her mistaking friends or designing foes, dare to affirm that she authorizes any description of Christians to build even their purest profession of attachment to her doctrines and institutions, on the supersedure of the rights of one individual, whether he be her devoted friend, or her determined foe! She is, then, no more that last and best gift of God to man; that true Christianity, which in the Scripture, her only glass, smiles with benignity upon all the rights of mankind." (Graham on Establishments.)

But religious instruction people should be provided. Who instruct them now?

for the bulk of the Let it by all means. Whose schools ex

clude half the population of the country-those of the Sectaries or of the Establishment? Who raise the character of the poor by discourses which they can understand and feel? What sort of instructors will they generally be, who owe their office, not to the people, but to patronage? What is the fact? Where dissent is tolerated, is not more knowledge diffused by voluntary exertion than by established institutions? We may read, in broad characters, the importance of liberty to religious light, in those countries where the genuine spirit and tendency of slavery is unmitigated by the corrective of even tolerated dissent. How deplorable is their condition! There the populace are uniformly sunk in the most abject ignorance and superstition. There priests and people, blind leaders of the blind, sink together into the very barbarism of ignorance. There is the grave of intellect and of knowledge, of morals and of freedom.

And what need be feared from perfect religious liberty as to the peace of society? Political interference gives bitterness and fury to the controversies of sects, by holding out emoluments and power as the prize of contention ;-without this, theological warfare is harmless: it neither robs nor murders. Placed thus on equal terms, the passions hushed, truth would be pursued more disinterestedly; charity would prevail; Christianity would reassume her primeval simplicity and purity; and, cleansed from internal corruptions

her professors, by mutual knowledge and examination, united in mind and heart, the path would be again open for conversion, and the gospel would go forth "conquering and to conquer."

Paley's defence of Establishments is comprised in the following propositions: "The knowledge and profession of Christianity cannot be upholden without a clergy: a clergy cannot be supported without a legal provision; a legal provision for the clergy cannot be constituted without the preference of one sect of Christians to the rest." (Moral Philosophy, Book vi. Ch. ix.) This argument is as applicable to Astronomy, or any other science, as to Christianity; and is as fallacious and inconsistent with experience in the one case, as in the other. Not one of these three propositions is true; and the argument requires the truth of all. The first and second are disproved by the history of the early Christians, of the Quakers, and of other Dissenters; and the third, by the examples, just now alluded to, of Holland, Canada, and the United States. Even if true, the conclusion might, and if what has been already urged be admitted, would be destroyed by the unavoidable evils attending establishments. The first allegation is very unfortunate; as it cannot be denied that the best defences of Christianity, which have appeared in our language, have been the work of Dissenters. Paley himself did little more than abridge, and select from, the writings