"But," It Will Be Said, "All The Intelligence And Education Of This
People Have Not Saved Them From Falling Out Among Themselves And
Their Friends, And Running Into Troubles By Which They Will Be
Ruined.
Their political arrangements have been so bad that, in
spite of all their reading and writing, they must go
To the wall."
I venture to express an opinion that they will by no means go to
the wall, and that they will be saved from such a destiny, if in no
other way, then by their education. Of their political
arrangements, as I mean before long to rush into that perilous
subject, I will say nothing here. But no political convulsions,
should such arise - no revolution in the Constitution, should such
be necessary - will have any wide effect on the social position of
the people to their serious detriment. They have the great
qualities of the Anglo-Saxon race - industry, intelligence, and
self-confidence; and if these qualities will no longer suffice to
keep such a people on their legs, the world must be coming to an
end.
I have said that it is not a common thing to meet an American who
belongs to no denomination of Christian worship. This I think is
so but I would not wish to be taken as saying that religion, on
that account, stands on a satisfactory footing in the States. Of
all subjects of discussion, this is the most difficult. It is one
as to which most of us feel that to some extent we must trust to
our prejudices rather than our judgments. It is a matter on which
we do not dare to rely implicitly on our own reasoning faculties,
and therefore throw ourselves on the opinions of those whom we
believe to have been better men and deeper thinkers than ourselves.
For myself, I love the name of State and Church, and believe that
much of our English well-being has depended on it. I have made up
my mind to think that union good, and am not to be turned away from
that conviction. Nevertheless I am not prepared to argue the
matter. One does not always carry one's proof at one's finger
ends.
But I feel very strongly that much of that which is evil in the
structure of American politics is owing to the absence of any
national religion, and that something also of social evil has
sprung from the same cause. It is not that men do not say their
prayers. For aught I know, they may do so as frequently and as
fervently, or more frequently and more fervently, than we do; but
there is a rowdiness, if I may be allowed to use such a word, in
their manner of doing so which robs religion of that reverence
which is, if not its essence, at any rate its chief protection. It
is a part of their system that religion shall be perfectly free,
and that no man shall be in any way constrained in that matter.
Consequently, the question of a man's religion is regarded in a
free-and-easy way. It is well, for instance, that a young lad
should go somewhere on a Sunday; but a sermon is a sermon, and it
does not much concern the lad's father whether his son hear the
discourse of a freethinker in the music-hall, or the eloquent but
lengthy outpouring of a preacher in a Methodist chapel. Everybody
is bound to have a religion, but it does not much matter what it
is.
The difficulty in which the first fathers of the Revolution found
themselves on this question is shown by the constitutions of the
different States. There can be no doubt that the inhabitants of
the New England States were, as things went, a strictly religious
community. They had no idea of throwing over the worship of God,
as the French had attempted to do at their revolution. They
intended that the new nation should be pre-eminently composed of a
God-fearing people; but they intended also that they should be a
people free in everything - free to choose their own forms of
worship. They intended that the nation should be a Protestant
people; but they intended also that no man's conscience should be
coerced in the matter of his own religion. It was hard to
reconcile these two things, and to explain to the citizens that it
behooved them to worship God - even under penalties for omission;
but that it was at the same time open to them to select any form of
worship that they pleased, however that form might differ from the
practices of the majority. In Connecticut it is declared that it
is the duty of all men to worship the Supreme Being, the Creator
and Preserver of the universe, but that it is their right to render
that worship in the mode most consistent with the dictates of their
consciences. And then, a few lines further down, the article skips
the great difficulty in a manner somewhat disingenuous, and
declares that each and every society of Christians in the State
shall have and enjoy the same and equal privileges. But it does
not say whether a Jew shall be divested of those privileges, or, if
he be divested, how that treatment of him is to be reconciled with
the assurance that it is every man's right to worship the Supreme
Being in the mode most consistent with the dictates of his own
conscience.
In Rhode Island they were more honest. It is there declared that
every man shall be free to worship God according to the dictates of
his own conscience, and to profess and by argument to maintain his
opinion in matters of religion; and that the same shall in no wise
diminish, enlarge, or affect his civil capacity. Here it is simply
presumed that every man will worship a God, and no allusion is made
even to Christianity.
In Massachusetts they are again hardly honest.
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