Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/16

10 in its ancient sternness, resolutely and to its singular honour excluding the slave-owner from its pale. The Church of the Mormons is chiefly fed from the Old World. Mormonism is in fact the English or Welsh peasant’s craving for a more equal lot, combined with his Old Testament fallacies and his wild apocalyptic faith. Materialism, it is said, is found among the German emigrants, and among them alone.

All the Churches must be and visibly are affected by the element of political democracy which surrounds them, and this not only in their forms of government but even in their modes of thought. It is hard to believe in an arbitrary God when all the institutions of man around you preach justice. It is hard to believe in an unmerciful God, when all the institutions of man around you preach mercy.

If, however, America has produced no new theology she has produced Religious Liberty; and from Religious Liberty in time better things still will spring. The circumstances under which these waifs of all the Churches of Christendom were cast upon the American coast were such as to preclude the existence of a dominant sect and to forbid mutual persecution. For a moment the Calvinists of New England displayed the intolerance which they had learnt in the old world; but that moment was soon past. The tendency of the British dominion to establish Anglicanism at the South ended with the dominion itself. Even Roman Catholicism, in its turn a fugitive from persecution, proclaimed toleration in its new abode. Not only the political and social equality, but the political and social union of the Churches is almost complete, saving in the case of Roman Catholicism; and even a Roman Catholic priest is