WHAT THE SAGES AND THE PROPHETS HAVE SAID.
If the principle is once established that religion, or religious observances, shall be interwoven with our legislative acts, we must pursue it to its ultimatum.—United States Senate Report, 1829. 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 lighter penalties suggests the use and propriety of capital punishment.—Gibbon, in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap. 37, par. 23. Toleration is an important step from state churchism to free churchism. But it is only a step. There is a very great difference between toleration and liberty. Toleration is a concession which may be withdrawn. It implies a preference for the ruling form of faith and worship, and a practical disapproval of all other forms. . . . In our country we ask no toleration for religion and its free exercise, but we claim it as an inalienable right.—Dr. Philip Schaff, in Church and State in the United States, page 14. 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. Every man is accountable to God alone for his religious faith.—Washington. Let the national Legislature once perform an act which involves the decision of a religious controversy, and it will have passed its legitimate bounds. The precedent will then be established, and the foundation laid, for that usurpation of the divine prerogative in this country which has been the desolating scourge to the fairest portions of the Old World.—United States Senate Report, 1829. Besides, the spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless. A single zealot may commence persecution, and better men be his victims. It can never be too often repeated that the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest, and ourselves united. From the conclusion of this war we shall be going downhill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war, will remain on us long, will be made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion.—Jefferson, in His Notes on Virginia, query-xxiii. Keep the state and church forever separate.—U. S. Grant.