Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/15

Rh the different Protestant sects, the Presbyterians, the Baptists, the Methodists, which three communions embrace the bulk of the people; Presbyterianism being the religion of the section corresponding to our upper middle class, while the other two are the religions of the masses. There is Unitarianism, the religion of the cultivated, rather negative, it is said, in many cases, and tending to scepticism: not seldom, perhaps, a decent name which scepticism itself assumes among a religious people. There is Roman Catholicism, the religion of the Irish emigrants, and for them, in their uneducated state, indispensable; somewhat more rational, less given to miracles, relics, and mariolatry, and, if the court of Rome would let it be, less intriguing than in Europe, but everywhere, it is to be feared, inherently anti-social and the inveterate enemy of united education. There is Anglicanism, the genteel religion of the rich and fashionable world, a character which it has kept since the colonial days, with an element of Romanism in it as here, and a clergy who, like ours, would fain be a priesthood, but with a democratic and lay ascendancy in its government which keeps these tendencies within bounds, while, in deference to the sentiment of a rational and charitable community, it ceases to utter the denunciatory dogmatism of the Athanasian Creed. Universalism, of which English divines speak with terror as a vast and portentous heresy, is simply Protestantism, less the more cruel doctrines of Calvinism, against which it is a reaction. The hardness and the tyranny of extreme Calvinism send not a few converts in America to Episcopacy itself. There are sects of a more enthusiastic and grotesque kind, such as life in the wilderness produces when religious passion is under no intellectual control. There is Cameronianism,