st honor to risk
their blood and their lives for the vainglory of a tyrant; yet in a free
state no more mischievous expedient could be planned or attempted.
Wholly repugnant to the general freedom are such devices as enthralling
men's minds with prejudices, forcing their judgment, or employing any of
the weapons of quasi-religious sedition; indeed, such seditions only
spring up, when law enters the domain of speculative thought, and
opinions are put on trial and condemned on the same footing as crimes,
while those who defend and follow them are sacrificed, not to public
safety, but to their opponents' hatred and cruelty. If deeds only could
be made the grounds of criminal charges, and words were always allowed
to pass free, such seditions would be divested of every semblance of
justification, and would be separated from mere controversies by a hard
and fast line.

Now seeing that we have the rare happiness of living in a republic,
where every one's judgment is free and unshackled, where each may
worship God as his conscience dictates, and where freedom is esteemed
before all things dear and precious, I have believed that I should be
undertaking no ungrateful or unprofitable task, in demonstrating that
not only can such freedom be granted without prejudice to the public
peace, but also, that without such freedom, piety cannot flourish nor
the public peace be secure....

I have often wondered that persons who make a boast of professing the
Christian religion, namely, love, joy, peace, temperance, and charity to
all men, should quarrel with such rancorous animosity, and display daily
towards one another such bitter hatred, that this, rather than the
virtues they claim, is the readiest criterion of their faith. Matters
have long since come to such a pass that one can only pronounce a man
Christian, Turk, Jew, or Heathen, by his general appearance and attire,
by his frequenting this or that place of worship, or employing the
phraseology of a particular sect--as for manner of life, it is in all
cases the same. Inquiry into the cause of this anomaly leads me
unhesitatingly to ascribe it to the fact, that the ministries of the
Church are regarded by the masses merely as dignities, her offices as
posts of emolument--in short, popular religion may be summed up as a
respect for ecclesiastics. The spread of this misconception inflamed
every worthless fellow with an intense desire to enter holy orders, and
thus the love of diffusi