What is to be said of the southern fruits of "the root of all democracy?" Excluding the debased slaves, and the helpless, suffering victims of the system, there remain the laity, who, as they do not abolish slavery, must be concluded not to understand the religion with whose principles it cannot coexist; and the acquiescing clergy, who, if they do not understand its principles, are unfit to be clergymen: and if they do, are unfit to be called Christians.
The Presbyterians of the south have reason to perceive that the principles of christian liberty are not fully embraced by their brethren of the north, though acted upon by some with a disinterested heroism in the direction of abolition. Those who would exclude slave-holders from the communion-table are usurping an authority which the principles of their religion forbid. The hatred to the Catholics also approaches too nearly in its irreligious character to the oppression of the negro. It is pleaded by some who most mourn the persecution the Catholics are at present undergoing in the United States, that there is a very prevalent ignorance on the subject of the Catholic religion; and that dreadful slanders are being circulated by a very few wicked, which deceive a great many weak, persons. This is just the case: but there is that in the true christian religion which should intercept the hatred, whatever may be the ignorance. There is that in the true christian religion which should give the lie to those slanders, in the absence of all outward evidence of their untruth. There is that in true Christianity which should chasten the imagination, allay faithless apprehensions, and inspire a trust that, as heart answers to heart, no vast body of men can ever bind themselves by the name of Jesus, to become all that is most the reverse of holy, harmless, and undefiled. The question "where is thy faith?" might reasonably have been put to the Presbyterian clergyman who preached three long denunciations against the Catholics in Boston, the Sunday before the burning of the Charlestown convent: and also to parents, who can put into their children's hands, as religious books, the foul libels against the Catholics which are circulated throughout the country. In the west, I happened to find in the chamber of a very young lady, the only child of an opulent and influential citizen, a book of this kind, which no epithet but filthy will suit. It lay with her Bible and Prayer-book; the secular part of her library being disposed elsewhere. If religion springs from morals, those who put the book into the hands of this young girl will be answerable, if her religion should be as little like that which is "first pure, then peaceable," as their own.
I was seriously told, by several persons in the south and west, that the Catholics of America were employed by the Pope, in league with the Emperor of Austria and the Irish, to explode the Union. The vast and rapid spread of the Catholic faith in the United States has excited observation, which grew into this rumour. I believe the truth to be that, in consequence of the Pope's wish to keep the Catholics of America a colonial church, and the Catholics of the country thinking themselves now sufficiently numerous to be an American Catholic church, a great stimulus has been given to proselytism. This has awakened fear and persecution; which last has, again, been favourable to the increase of the sect. While the Presbyterians preach a harsh, ascetic, persecuting religion, the Catholics dispense a mild and indulgent one; and the prodigious increase of their numbers is a necessary consequence. It is found so impossible to supply the demand for priests, that the term of education has been shortened by two years.—Those observers who have made themselves familiar with the modes in which institutions, even of the most definite character, adapt themselves to the wants of the time, will not be made uneasy by the spread of a religion so flexible in its forms as the Catholic, among a people so intelligent as the Americans. The Catholic body is democratic in its politics, and made up from the more independent kind of occupations. The Catholic religion is modified by the spirit of the time in America; and its professors are not a set of men who can be priest-ridden to any fatal extent. If they are let alone, and treated on genuine republican principles, they may show us how the true, in any old form of religion, may be separated from the false, till, the eye being made clear, the whole body will be full of light. If they cannot do this, their form of religion will decay, or at least remain harmless; for it is assuredly too late now for a return of the dark ages. At all events, every American is required by his democratic principles to let every man alone about his religion. He may do with the religion what seems to him good; study, controvert, adopt, reject, speak, write, or preach, whatever he perceives and thinks about its doctrines and its abuses: but with its professors he has nothing to do, further than religiously to observe his fraternal relation to them; suffering no variance of opinion to seduce him into a breach of the republican and christian brotherhood to which he is pledged.
What other fruits are there of the superstition which pervades society, comprehending under the term Christian many who know little of its doctrine, and exhibit less of its spirit? The state and treatment of infidelity are some of the worst.
There is in this respect a dreadful infringement on human rights throughout the north; though a better spirit is being cherished and extended by a few who see how contrary to all christian and all democratic principles it is that a man should be the worse for his opinions in society. I have seen enough to know how little chance Christianity has in consequence of this infringement. I know that very large numbers of people are secretly disinclined to cherish what is imposed upon them, with perpetual and unvarying modes of observance, from their childhood up; and how the disgust grows from the opprobrium with which unbelief is visited. I know that there are minds in New England, as everywhere else, which must, from their very structure, pass through a state of scepticism on their way to stability; and that such are surrounded with snares, such as no man should lay in his brother's path; with temptations to hypocrisy, to recklessness, to despair; and to an abdication of their human prerogative of reason, as well as conscience. I know how women, in whom the very foundations of belief have been ploughed up by the share of authority, go wearily to church, Sunday after Sunday, to hear what they do not believe; lie down at night full of self-reproach for a want of piety which they do not know how to attain; and rise up in the morning hopelessly, seeing nothing in the day before them but the misery of carrying their secret concealed from parents, husband, sisters, friends. I know how young men are driven into vice, by having only the alternative of conformity or opprobrium: feeling it impossible to believe what is offered them; feeling it to be no crime to disbelieve: but, seeing unbelief treated as crime, and themselves under suspicion of it, losing faith in others and in themselves, and falling in reality at last. All this, and very much more, I know to be happening. I was told of one and another, with an air of mystery, like that with which one is informed of any person being insane, or intemperate, or insolvent, that so and so was thought to be an unbeliever. I was always tempted to reply, "And so are you, in a thousand things, to which this neighbour of yours adds one."—An elderly, generally intelligent, benevolent gentleman told me that he wanted to see regulations made by which deists should be excluded from office, and moral men only admitted. Happily, the community is not nearly so far gone in tyranny and folly as to entertain such a project as this: but it must be a very superstitious society where such an idea could be deliberately expressed by a sane man.
One circumstance struck me throughout the country. Almost as often as the conversation between myself and any other person on religious subjects became intimate and earnest, I was met by the supposition that I was a convert. It was the same in other instances: wherever there was a strong interest in the christian religion, conversion to a particular profession of it was confidently supposed. This fact speaks volumes.
Happy influences are at work to enlighten and enlarge the mind of society. One of the most powerful of these is the union of men and women of all religions in pursuit of objects of common interest; particularly in the abolition cause. Persons who were once ready to excommunicate each other are now loving friends in their mutual obedience to the weightier matters of the law. The churches in Boston, and even the other public buildings, being guarded by the dragon of bigotry, so that even faith, hope, and charity are turned back from the doors, a large building is about to be erected for the use of all, deists not excepted, who may desire to meet for purposes of free discussion. This is, at least, an advance.
A reflecting and eminently religious person was speculating with me one day, on the influences by which the human mind is the most commonly and the most powerfully awakened to vivid and permanent religious sensibility. We brought cases and suppositions of its being now strong impressions of the beauty and grandeur of nature; now grief, and now joy, and so on. My friend concluded that it was most frequently the spectacle of moral beauty in an individual. I have no doubt it is so: and if it be, what tremendous injury must be done to the highest parts of man's nature by the unprincipled tyranny of the religious world in the republic! Men declare by this very tyranny how essential they consider belief to be. Belief is essential,—not only to safety, but to existence. Every mind lives by belief, as the body lives by the atmosphere: but the objects and modes of belief must be various; and it is from disallowing this that superstition arises. If men must exercise the mutual vigilance which their human affections prompt, it would be well for religion and for themselves that they should note how much their brethren believe, rather than what they disbelieve: the amount would be found so vast as immeasurably to distance the deficiency. If this were done, religion would be found to be so safe that the proportions of sects, and the eccentricities of individuals would be lost sight of in the presence of universal, living, and breathing faith. I was told of a child who stood in the middle of a grass-plat, with its arms by its sides, and listening with a countenance of intense expectation, "to hear God's tramp on that high blue floor." Who would care to know what christian sect this child belonged to; or whether to any?—I was told of a father and mother, savages, who lost their only child, and were overwhelmed with grief, under which the father soon sank. From the moment of his death, the solitary survivor recovered her cheerfulness. Being asked why, she said she had been miserable for her child, lest he should be forlorn in the world of spirits: he had his father with him now, and would be happy. Who would inquire for the creed of this example of disinterested love?—I was told of a young girl, brought up from the country by a selfish betrayer, refused the marriage which had been promised, and turned out of doors by him on her being seized with the cholera. She was picked up from a doorstep, and carried to the hospital. In the midst of her dying agonies, no inducement could prevail on her to tell the name of her betrayer; and she died faithful to him, so that the secret of whose treachery we are abhorring is dead with her. With such testimony that the very spirit of the gospel was in this humble creature, none but those who would dare to cast her out for her fall would feel any anxiety as to how she received the facts of the gospel. Religion is safe, and would be seen to be so if we would set ourselves to mark how universal are some few of men's convictions, and the whole of man's affections. While men feel wonder, and the universe is wonderful; while men love natural glory, and the heavens and the earth are resplendent with it; while men revere holiness, and the beauty of holiness beams at times upon the dimmest sight, religion is safe. For the last reason, Christianity is also safe. If the beauty of its holiness were never obscured by the defilements of human passion with which it is insulted, it is scarcely conceivable that all men would not be, in some sense or other, Christians.
Those who are certain that Christianity is safe, (and they are not a few,) and who, therefore, beware of encroaching on their brother's liberty of conscience, will be found to be the most principled republicans, the firmest believers that Christianity is "the root of all democracy: the highest fact in the Rights of Man."