WHAT RELIGIOUS LEGISLATION MEANS.
Consider These in Connection with the Agitation for Sunday Laws.
It is incumbent on the authors of persecution previously to reflect whether they are determined to support it in the last extreme. They excite the flame which they strive to extinguish, and it soon becomes necessary to chastise the contumacy, as well as the crime, of the offender. The fine which he is unable or unwilling to discharge, exposes his person to the severities of the law, and his contempt of higher penalties suggests the use and propriety of capital punishment.—Gibbon, “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” chap. 37. If the principle is once established that religion or religious observance shall be interwoven with our legislative acts, we must pursue it to its ultimatum.—United States Senate Report, 1829. Our Constitution recognized no other power than that of persuasion for enforcing religious observances. Let the professors of Christianity recommend their religion by deeds of benevolence, by Christian meekness, by lives of temperance and holiness. Let them combine their efforts to instruct the ignorant, to relieve the widow and the orphan, to promulgate to the world the Gospel of their Saviour, recommending its precepts by their habitual example. . . . Their moral influence will then do infinitely more to advance the true interests of religion than any measure which they may call on Congress to enact.—United States Senate Report, 1829. Extensive religious combinations to effect a political object are, in the opinion of the committee, always dangerous. All religious despotism commences by combination and influence; and when that influence begins to operate upon the political institutions of a country, the civil power soon bends under it, and the catastrophe of other nations furnishes an awful warning of the consequence.—United States Senate Report, 1829. We hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth that religion, or the duty which we owe our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence. The religion, then, of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man, and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an undeniable right.—James Madison.