happens
to belong to the highest civilization, and we frequently use the term as
synonymous with the _morality_ of this civilization. But when we come to
define strictly according to the theological import of the word, there
are many of us who are not Christians. In the former sense, Mr. Paine
and Junius were Christians; in the latter sense, they were not. And now
for the proof. Junius says, in Letter 15, to the Duke of Grafton: "It is
not, indeed, the least of the thousand contradictions which attend you,
that a man marked to the world by the grossest violation of ceremony and
decorum, should be the first servant of a court in which _prayers are
morality_, and _kneeling is religion_." For this, and his attacks on the
priesthood, and his frequently putting piety in antithesis to morality,
he was at last accused of being an impious and irreligious man. He now
puts Philo Junius forward to explain his religious views, who says, in
Letter 54: "These candid critics never remember any thing he says in
honor of our holy religion, though it is true that one of his leading
arguments is made to rest 'upon the internal evidence which the purest
of all religions carries with it.' I quote his words, and conclude from
them that he is a true and hearty Christian--_in substance_, not in
_ceremony_--though possibly he may not agree with my reverend lords the
bishops, or with the head of the Church, 'that prayers are morality, or
that kneeling is religion.'"

That is, Junius was a Christian who, upon moral principles, did not say
his prayers, and who thought that forms were no part of religion. In
other words, if the highest morality was Christianity, he claimed to be
a Christian, and would not stoop "to reconcile the sanctimonious forms
of religion with the utter destruction of morality."

This, too, was Mr. Paine's Christianity. In a national and moral sense
he uses the term with approbation, but when in a theological sense he
disowns it. He says, in Crisis, ii: "This ingratitude may suit a tory,
or the _unchristian_ peevishness of a fallen Quaker, but none else." In
Crisis, i, he says: "I wish, with all the devotion of a Christian, that
the names of whig and tory may never more be mentioned." To the Quakers
he says: "Call not coldness of soul religion, nor put the _bigot_ in the
place of the _Christian_." In Common Sense he says: "For myself, I fully
and conscientiously believe that it is the will of the Almighty that
there should be