f reaching the uncultivated minds
of the masses, and even of a large portion of the illiterate gentry and
aristocracy. If we reflect, with what reverence creeds are, even now,
traditionally inherited in families, we must be patient with their
entailed tenure in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The soul of
nations cannot be purged of its ancestral faith by Acts of Parliament.
There may be submission to law, external indifference, hypocritical
compliance, but, that implicit adoption and correspondent honest action,
which flow from conscientious belief, must spring from sources of very
different sanctity.

When the world contained only one great Christian Church, the idea of
Union betwixt that Church and the State, was not fraught with the
disgusts or dangers that now characterize it. There were then no sects.
All were agreed on one faith, one ritual, one interpretation of God's
law, and one infallible expositor; nor was it, perhaps, improper that
this law--thus ecclesiastically expounded and administered in perfect
national unity of faith--should be the rule of civil and political, as
well as of religious life. Indeed, it is difficult, even now, to
separate the ideas; for, inasmuch as God's law is a law of life, and not
a mere law of death--inasmuch as it controls all our relations among
ourselves and thus defines our practical duty to the Almighty--it is
difficult, I repeat, to define wherein the law of man should properly
differ from the law of God. Mere morality--mere political morality,--is
nothing but a bastard policy, or another name for expediency, unless it
conforms in all its motives, means and results, to religion. In truth,
morality, social as well as political, to be vital and not hypocritical,
must be religion put into practical exercise. This is the simple, just,
and wise reconciliation of religion and good government, which I humbly
believe to be, ever and only, founded upon Christianity. But it was a
sad mistake in other days, to confound a Primitive Christianity and the
dogmas of a Historical Church. Unfortunately for the ancient union of
Church and State, this great identification of the true christian action
of the civil and ecclesiastical bodies, was but a mere fiction, so far
as religion was concerned, and a fact, only so far as power was
interested. Christianity ever has remained, and ever will remain, the
same radiant unit; but a church, with irresponsible power--a church
which, at best, is bu