ng-houses. In
Rhode Island, on the other hand, no sectarian preacher will permit an
Unitarian to pollute his desk. In our Richmond there is much fanaticism,
but chiefly among the women. They have their night meetings and praying
parties, where, attended by their priests, and sometimes by a hen-pecked
husband, they pour forth the effusions of their love to Jesus, in terms
as amatory and carnal, as their modesty would permit them to use to a
mere earthly lover. In our village of Charlottesville, there is a good
degree of religion, with a small spice only of fanaticism. We have four
sects, but without either church or meeting-house. The court-house is
the common temple, one Sunday in the month to each. Here, Episcopalian
and Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist, meet together, join in
hymning their Maker, listen with attention and devotion to each others'
preachers, and all mix in society with perfect harmony. It is not so in
the districts where Presbyterianism prevails undividedly. Their ambition
and tyranny would tolerate no rival, if they had power. Systematical
in grasping at an ascendancy over all other sects, they aim, like the
Jesuits, at engrossing the education of the country, are hostile to
every institution which they do not direct, and jealous at seeing others
begin to attend at all to that object. The diffusion of instruction, to
which there is now so growing an attention, will be the remote remedy
to this fever of fanaticism; while the more proximate one will be the
progress of Unitarianism. That this will, ere long, be the religion of
the majority from north to south, I have no doubt.

In our University you know there is no professorship of Divinity. A
handle has been made of this, to disseminate an idea that this is
an institution, not merely of no religion, but against all religion.
Occasion was taken at the last meeting of the Visitors, to bring forward
an idea that might silence this calumny, which weighed on the minds
of some honest friends to the institution. In our annual report to the
legislature, after stating the constitutional reasons against a public
establishment of any religious instruction, we suggest the expediency of
encouraging the different religious sects to establish, each for itself,
a professorship of their own tenets, on the confines of the University,
so near as that the students may attend the lectures there, and have
the free use our own library, and every other accommodation we can