re answerable for its existence formerly or now, nor for the
principles, truths, or rites, which constitute it. They have received
it, as they have received a thousand customs which are now among them,
by inheritance from the ancestors who bequeathed them, which they
received at too early an age to judge concerning their fitness or
unfitness, but to which, for the reason of that early reception, they
have become fondly attached, even as to parents, brothers, and sisters,
from whom they have never been divided. It becomes not the Christian,
therefore, to load with reproaches those who are placed where they are,
not by their own will, but by the providence of the Great Ruler. Neither
does it become you of the Roman faith to reproach us for the faith to
which we adhere; because the greater proportion of us also have
inherited our religion, as you yours, from parents and a community who
professed it before us, and all regard it as heaven-descended, and so
proved to be divine, that without inexpiable guilt we may not refuse to
accept it. It must be in the face of reason, then, and justice, in the
face of what is both wise and merciful, if either should judge harshly
of the other.

'Besides, what do I behold in this wide devotion of the Roman people to
the religion of their ancestors, but a testimony, beautiful for the
witness it bears, to the universality of that principle or feeling,
which binds the human heart to some god or gods, in love and worship?
The worship may be wrong, or greatly imperfect, and sometimes injurious;
the god or gods may be so conceived of, as to act with hurtful
influences upon human character and life; still it is religion; it is a
sentiment that raises the thoughts of the humble and toilworn from the
earthly and the perishing, to the heavenly and the eternal. And this,
though accompanied by some or many rites shocking to humanity, and
revolting to reason, is better than that men were, in this regard, no
higher nor other than brutes; but received their being as they do
theirs, they know not whence, and when they lose it, depart like them,
they know not and care not whither. In the religious character of the
Roman people--for religious in the earlier ages of this empire they
eminently were, and they are religious now, though in less degree--I
behold and acknowledge the providence of God, who has so framed us that
our minds tend by resistless force to himself; satisfied at first with
low and crude con