they seemed necessary. Our fathers
had that religious sentiment, that trust in Providence, that
determination to do right, and to seek, through every degree of toil and
suffering, the honor of God, and the preservation of their liberties,
which we shall do well to cherish, to imitate, and to equal, so far as
God may enable us. It may be true, and it is true, that in the progress
of society the milder virtues have come to belong more especially to our
day and our condition. The Pilgrims had been great sufferers from
intolerance; it was not unnatural that their own faith and practice, as
a consequence, should become somewhat intolerant. This is the common
infirmity of human nature. Man retaliates on man. It is to be hoped,
however, that the greater spread of the benignant principles of
religion, and of the divine charity of Christianity, has, to some
extent, improved the sentiments which prevailed in the world at that
time. No doubt the "first comers," as they were called, were attached to
their own forms of public worship and to their own particular and
strongly cherished religious sentiments. No doubt they esteemed those
sentiments, and the observances which they practised, to be absolutely
binding on all, by the authority of the word of God. It is true, I
think, in the general advancement of human intelligence, that we find
what they do not seem to have found, that a greater toleration of
religious opinion, a more friendly feeling toward all who profess
reverence for God, and obedience to His commands, is not inconsistent
with the great and fundamental principles of religion--I might rather
say is, itself, one of those fundamental principles. So we see in our
day, I think, without any departure from the essential principles of our
fathers, a more enlarged and comprehensive Christian philanthropy. It
seems to be the American destiny, the mission which God has intrusted to
us here on this shore of the Atlantic, the great conception and the
great duty to which we are born, to show that all sects, and all
denominations, professing reverence for the authority of the Author of
our being, and belief in His Revelations, may be safely tolerated
without prejudice either to our religion or to our liberties. [Cheers.]

We are Protestants, generally speaking; but you all know that there
presides at the head of the Supreme Judicature of the United States a
Roman Catholic; and no man, I suppose, through the whole United States,
imag