But, Sir, not content with striking at the colored race even in the very Temple of Justice, the Senator, finding an apology in the Constitution, insists upon the very exclusion from churches which the famous Petroleum V. Nasby had set up before. From juries I now come to churches. The Senator is not original; he copies, as I shall show, from a typical Democrat, who flourished during the war. But before I come to his prototype, let us consider the constitutional question presented by the Senator with so much gravity, without even the smile that plays so readily on his countenance. He seemed in earnest, when he read these words of the National Constitution:—
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
And still without a smile he argued that the application of the great political principles of the Declaration and of the recent Constitutional Amendments to a church organization incorporated by law was a violation of this provision, and he adduced the work of the much-venerated friend of my early life, and my master, the late Judge Story, expounding that provision. I do not know if the Senator read these words from the commentary of that great jurist:—
“The real object of the Amendment was not to countenance, much less to advance, Mahometanism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity, but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects,”—
Observe, Sir, what it is,—
“but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects, and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment, which should give to a hierarchy the exclusive patronage of the National Government.”[227]
How plain and simple! The real object was to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects, and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment. Such was the real object.
But the Senator says, if Congress decrees that the Declaration of Independence in its fundamental principles is applicable to a church organization incorporated by State or National authority, we violate this provision of the Constitution! You heard him, Sir; I do no injustice to his argument.
Our authority, Judge Story, continues in another place:—
“It was under a solemn consciousness of the dangers from ecclesiastical ambition, the bigotry of spiritual pride, and the intolerance of sects, thus exemplified in our domestic as well as in foreign annals, that it was deemed advisable to exclude from the National Government all power to act upon the subject.”[228]