orthodox, faithful, willing clergy, as the United
States of America at this moment; and never did a ministry, so worthy of
trust, have so little independence to act according to their conscience
and best discretion. They are literally the victims of a spiritual
tyranny that has started up and burst upon the world in a new form--at
least, with an extent of sway that has never been known. It is an
influence which comes up from the lowest conditions of life, which is
vested in the most ignorant minds, and, therefore, the more unbending
and uncontrollable. It is an influence which has been fostered and
blown into a wide-spread flame by a class of itinerating ministers, who
have suddenly started up and overrun the land, decrying and denouncing
all that have not yielded at once to their sway; by direct and open
efforts shaking and destroying public confidence in the settled and more
permanent ministry, leaving old paths and striking out new ones,
demolishing old systems and substituting others, and disturbing and
deranging the whole order of society as it had existed before. And it
is to this new state of things, so harassing, so destructive to health
and life, that the regular ministry of this country (the best qualified,
most pious, most faithful, and in all respects the most worthy Christian
ministry that the church has ever enjoyed in any age) are made the
victims. They cannot resist it, they are overwhelmed by it."

The fact is, that there is little or no healthy religion in their most
numerous and influential churches; it is all excitement. Twenty or
thirty years back, the Methodists were considered as extravagantly
frantic, but the Congregationalists and Presbyterians in the United
States have gone far ahead of them; and the Methodist church in America
has become to a degree Episcopal, and softened down into, perhaps, the
most pure, most mild, and most simple of all the creeds professed.

I have said that in these two churches the religious feeling was that of
excitement: I believe it to be more or less the case in _all_ religion
in America; for the Americans are a people who are prone to excitement,
not only from their climate, but constitutionally, and it is the
_caviare_ of their existence. If it were not so, why is it necessary
that revivals should be so continually called forth--a species of
stimulus, common, I believe, to almost every sect and creed, promoted
and practised in all their colleges, and consi