Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/476

466 pression and blood are ordinary items of their operations; and they use religion as a cold tyrant to inflict the one, or a fanatical butcher to shed the other.

Not less visible is the faith of the political theory of the United States. It was that faith which placed religion above the reach of the politician, that it might not by his arts be transformed from a consolation into a scourge. By the same faith, was our theory guided to associate itself with a catalogue of moral principles, precisely contrary to those used as accomplices by the old theories. It would be doubly inconsistent to allow faith to political theories, which make religion a pander for avarice, ambition and tyranny; and to deny it to one, which rescues it from this shameful servility. False religion, like false honour, is easily detected by discovering its source in prejudice, passion or fraud, and not in moral rectitude. Both, goaded on by an ignorant infatuation, or a wicked pride, expect heaven and fame for inflicting evils on mankind or on themselves. Both profess, boast, destroy and dissemble. The fanatick and the duellist are the same characters; devotees of vice or errour, and contemners of morality and truth; who per- vert honour and religion into caballistical terms, to bewitch, deceive, and torment themselves and others. How wonderfully astonished must these characters be, after a life of mutual contempt and execration, to discover their exact identity?

Mr. Adams has omitted to contrast the American and English systems, in relation to religion; and to acknowledge, that the freedom it enjoyed under the one, was incompatible with the principles of the other. The English, is one of those old theories, which makes gods or religions by law; and it is essential to this, as well as to all governments composed of orders, to coerce the mind into one opinion, religious and political; these orders being equivalent to a set of anatomists, for carving the faces of all mankind into one shape; except that the instruments which cut the mind, inflict more pain than those which cut the flesh; and