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 a weak and mistaken policy of legislators to make light of the religious persuasions of any people, or to suppose that because they may manage to get rid of a sense of religious obligation or deference to a “higher law,” they can therefore bring the mass of any Christian community to go counter to their conscientious convictions. The sentiment strikes too deep into the soil in which it is imbedded to be trifled with, though it is unhappily capable of being warped, and to a degree overborne, by the force of the sensual principle when addressed by its appropriate allurements.

We have, however, a strong ground of appeal when we come to our fellow-men, and sound to them a parley on the subject of religion. We find them, indeed, when thus accosted, cherishing, for the most part, very crude ideas of its nature, and of the requisites to becoming partakers of its priceless benefits. Yet the appeal meets with more or less of a response from the internal voice of the sentiment, notwithstanding the conception is oftentimes so gross that religion is regarded as something that is to be gotten from without, not unlike what befalls a man when he gets or catches the small-pox or the yellow fever. It is a sort of spiritual contagion, though of a very wholesome kind, and a man must put himself in the way of catching it, which it is thought he is in a fair way to do if he can be brought within the range of a revival, when the heavenly malaria is spreading itself around, and the happiest results are anticipated from inhaling it.

But notions like these, the offspring of false dogmas in theology, are bound to give way before the grave truth, that religion is something to be done, and not to be got, much less to be caught. It is at any rate to be gotten by being done. The account given of it by the Apostle James is very sound, and worthy of all acceptation. “Pure religion, and undefiled before God and the Father, is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.” From this it is evident that religion is a matter of life and action, and not of mere passive reception. It is but another name for duty, and the true idea of duty is that of conformity to the eternal laws of order. To cherish the love of good, to connect with it the truth, to put away evil, to deal uprightly, kindly, honestly, honorably, with the neighbor—this is religion, and this is something to be done.

From the high place assigned, in the structure of our being, to the religious element, it will be of course ever a subject of anxious intellectual inquiry. This inquiry is made at the present day by many earnest minds which are nonplussed by the immense diversity of creeds in vogue, and by the peculiar character of certain dogmas taught in most or all of what are termed evangelical or orthodox churches. It is not needful to specify; but the fact is becoming apparent that multitudes are growing restive under the proclamation of tenets which do not satisfy their reason, however strongly or imperatively urged upon their faith. This unsettled state of mind is not a little promoted by the fact, that it is rather the policy of these systems, or of their patrons and apostles, to frown upon a tendency in the public mind to push research so far into the mysteries of faith as to come back with clear and rational motions of the particulars, as well as the generals of the credenda of religion. But the spirit of free inquiry, evoked by the spirit of the age, will not down at the magisterial mandate of either king or priest, and consequently there is an indomitable prompting to look into the teachings of creeds and systems other than those which are accredited as exclusively sound and safe. Even such as are usually reputed heretical come in for a share