hip to the knowledge of the true God, and
everywhere bringing life and immortality to light through the Gospel,
have only been acting in obedience to the Divine instruction; they were
commanded to go forth, and they have gone forth, and they still go
forth. They have sought, and they still seek, to be able to preach the
Gospel to every creature under the whole heaven. And where was
Christianity ever received, where were its truths ever poured into the
human heart, where did its waters, springing up into everlasting life,
ever burst forth, except in the track of a Christian ministry? Did we
ever hear of an instance, does history record an instance, of any part
of the globe Christianized by lay preachers, or "lay teachers"? And,
descending from kingdoms and empires to cities and countries, to
parishes and villages, do we not all know, that wherever Christianity
has been carried, and wherever it has been taught, by human agency, that
agency was the agency of ministers of the Gospel? It is all idle, and a
mockery, to pretend that any man has respect for the Christian religion
who yet derides, reproaches, and stigmatizes all its ministers and
teachers. It is all idle, it is a mockery, and an insult to common
sense, to maintain that a school for the instruction of youth, from
which Christian instruction by Christian teachers is sedulously and
rigorously shut out, is not deistical and infidel both in its purpose
and in its tendency. I insist, therefore, that this plan of education
is, in this respect, derogatory to Christianity, in opposition to it,
and calculated either to subvert or to supersede it.

In the next place, this scheme of education is derogatory to
Christianity, because it proceeds upon the presumption that the
Christian religion is not the only true foundation, or any necessary
foundation, of morals. The ground taken is, that religion is not
necessary to morality, that benevolence may be insured by habit, and
that all the virtues may nourish, and be safely left to the chance of
flourishing, without touching the waters of the living spring of
religious responsibility. With him who thinks thus, what can be the
value of the Christian revelation? So the Christian world has not
thought; for by that Christian world, throughout its broadest extent, it
has been, and is, held as a fundamental truth, that religion is the only
solid basis of morals, and that moral instruction not resting on this
basis is only a building up