The Constitution and State Constitutions
AND now we have the climax to the National Reform argument for a change in the Constitution of the United States; Mr. John Alexander, of Philadelphia, sometime president of the National Reform Association, has been unburdening himself to a correspondent of the Universalist, to whom he affirms that our Constitution “is not in harmony with the State constitutions, which do confess God and his law”! That is equivalent to charging the United States Constitution with being unconstitutional, because some State constitutions have not been framed in harmony with it. Which is the larger, the State of Pennsylvania, or the United States? His argument is on a par with the objection to the Bible, because it does not agree with the latest developments of modern science. But Mr. Alexander’s pathetic plaint is valuable to this extent: It is an admission from National Reformers themselves, that those States which frame laws in favor of religious tenets, and which persecute conscientious dissenters from those tenets, are acting unconstitutionally.