Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/13

Rh still you trace the original type in all the lineaments of the now mighty frame. But the Northern States remain what their Puritan founders desired that they should ever be, a plantation religious. In America two things must strike every traveller, the equality of the habitations and the number of places of worship. Not only in New England is each city, each little town crowned with a cluster of steeples, it is the same in the Far West; and while Christianity is proclaimed to be dying here, its churches are rising, built by free will, in apparently unhesitating faith, wherever the pioneer axe makes room in the woods of Michigan, wherever the plough turns the soil in the prairies of Illinois, on the distant hills of Iowa, beneath the lonely headlands of the Upper Mississippi. Men go to write the life of Christ beside the sepulchre were he was laid; if they would go where Christianity is spreading over the untrodden West, they might know the meaning of the words, “He is risen indeed.” There is every outward sign of regard for religion among this people. The churches are well filled, and Sunday is well kept. Much of this perhaps may be deference to opinion; but opinion itself is free. The government must study the national character, and it always speaks as to a religious nation.

In America, too, there is a cry of the decay of faith; and there, too, less might be said of the decay of faith, if, in the first place, faith were not confounded with a belief in tradition; and if, in the second place, there were more of charity, and more of hope. There is, however, a religious crisis there as well as here, though it is less severe there than here; because in America there is no State Church to bar with a solid obstruction the current of