would be doing just what is virtually now done by their opponents. And then, the peace of the State; the prosperity of its literature; the well being of education; what is to become of all these great interests in such a struggle? It will be well for those, who plume themselves on dexterity of management, to keep these things steadily in view. One thing, I believe with entire conviction, they may count upon. There are those-and many are they too who will never settle down into a tame acquiescence, that might shall stand for right. We live in a State that threw the British tea overboard; proclaimed true national liberty in Faneuil Hall; fought the battles of Lexington and Bunker Hill; and led the van in the glorious achievement of national independence. How can it be expected that we are always to sit down quiet and inactive spectators, when some of our most sacred privileges are, as we fully believe, infringed upon ?

With a trembling hand and an aching heart I have penned these paragraphs. On calm review I cannot recall them. I do know that they speak the feelings of scores of thousands; and imperfectly as I have done the duty of giving these feelings a voice, I hope I shall not be taxed with exceeding the proper bounds of a freeman, a Protestant, and a follower of the Pilgrims.

If my feeble voice, moreover, might reach the venerable Halls of Justice, I should venture to say a word even there. I have an almost excessive regard for our high Courts of Justice, and believe them to be the very life guard in the temple of liberty. It may be, that this is the result, in part, of my earlier studies, which would have led me to frequent them; and which at all events have filled me with enthusiasm for the noble science of Jurisprudence. But I think every reflecting reader, who attentively peruses the history of England, must come to feel that her Judiciary has been the bulwark, and the rampart, and the high tower, of English liberty, and of the permanence of all her civic institutions. And so it is with us. Liberty-right-lives or dies with our Courts. Put a Jeffries of former days upon our Supreme Tribunal, and what will be the result? The question needs no answer.

It is my full persuasion, that our Judges do in effect make twenty practical laws in reality, where our Legislators make one. So it must be; and so, I am ready to say, it should be. They must have more skill, than the unpractised; and they have as little motive to do wrong, as any body of men on earth.

But I must now come to a more unwelcome part of my task. I have read with attention, and with no little interest the decision

of Chief Justice Parsons in the case of Burr vs. the Inhabitants of Sandwich, (Mass. Reports IX. p. 277 seq.); of Chief Justice Parker, in the case of Baker et Al. vs. Fales, (Mass. Rep. XVI. p. 488 seq.); of Chief Justice Shaw, in the case of Stebbins vs. Jennings, (Pick. Rep. X. p. 172 seq.); all having one general bearing, and all settling down on the principle, that a Christian church among us has no political existence, except as connected with a parish, and no rights which she can claim or enforce, to property or anything else of appreciable value, when the majority of a parish are against her, and separate from her. All this too, notwithstanding an express Statute, which, long ago, made the deacons of a church a corporate body so far as it concerns the holding and claiming of church property. The last of these Judges has argued the case, as it strikes my mind, by far the most ably; and if he has not justified his decision under our laws as they are, (which I fully believe not to be the case), he has come nearer to it than any of his predecessors.

How stands this matter now, in our Commonwealth? Every church to which property has been given, can any day be stripped of it all, by a vote of a majority of a parish to form another church establishment, or even another ecclesiastical society. Such has been the case; and such will again be the case, in oft repeated instances.

How singularly all this strikes one who has just been reading the history of the Pilgrims, and finds that for half a century or more after our State was settled, no man could even enjoy the privileges of a freeman, who was not a member of a church! Church and parish were identical. Now, the church depends, it seems, on the will of a majority who are not members of it, in any particular place, for the rights, or at any rate for a part of the rights, of freemen. It has indeed no LEGAL rights as a church, except in and through a parish. What a change! As great as that from high Orthodoxy to low Unitarianism. Tempora mutantur; et nos-mutamur cum illis! Never was this more strikingly verrified. Our Republic began in the spirit; it is ending in the flesh.

It is impossible for any reflecting man to read history, from the first settlement of this Commonwealth down to the present period, without emotions of surprise, if not of regret. No country on earth was ever settled by such a band of men, as first sought these shores in order to find a refuge from the oppression of the mother-country. There the all engrossing theme was, the established religion-the established religion-the established

religion; the exact counterpart of "the temple of the Lordthe temple of the Lord- the temple of the Lord are these,” in Jer. 7: 4. Of course a man was deemed a secret rebel, who did not conform to the established religion, and finally was thrust into pillories and jails, and abridged of some of his highly important civil and social rights, for non-conformity. The Pilgrim Band could not-would not-brook this. They sought an asylum from the oppression and contumacy of their rulers, spiritual and temporal, on the shores of a new world, so distant that they indulged the hope, that " rumour of oppression and deceit would never reach them more." Here they established a government which has grown up, and become consolidated, and has comprised, and still comprises, a body of men, such as all the world besides is unable to exceed, if they can anywhere equal them, as to intellectual, civil, and social acquisitions and privileges. These are facts which no well-informed considerate man will venture to deny. Every legislative speech, every public oration, every harangue in Fanueil Hall, admits and boasts of all this; and Unitarians as much as others. Our fathers did this; and our fathers did that; and by their immortal wisdom and sagacity, and their lofty spirit of freedom, they erected the goodly structure in which their posterity meet to eulogize them, and to exhort one another to walk in their steps, and to copy their example.

Here now is one of the most singular things ever recorded by the faithful Muse of history. What sort of men were they, then, who achieved all these wonderful deeds, worthy of eulogy until time shall be no more? The very class of men, whom Dr. Channing, and his admirers, and indeed many Unitarians of all grades, proclaim to be worshippers of a God who has the attributes of a devil; to be credulous, superstitious, and given to "old wives' fables;" to be zealous for doctrines" which fall far below most of the heathen systems of religion;" to aim at cramping and subjugating all freedom of investigation, reasoning, or opinion, in matters of religion; and to be bent upon fastening on the necks of the community a yoke more galling than that of the Inquisition itself. For surely, if all these things are said of the present generation of the Orthodox, (and no one will dare deny that they are), then they are affirmed a fortiori of our fathers, who went much further in giving legal protection to the churches than we, and were much farther than we now are, from the true line of entire Christian liberty. But how comes it about that these "devil-worshippers," and "bigots," and "fol

lowers in the train of St. Dominic," erected such a glorious temple to Liberty, lofty as the heavens, and wide as the domain of the Commonwealth? How came the most perfect Republic on the face of the whole earth, from the hands of such men as these? If any Unitarian, who reëchoes the reproachful words of Dr. Channing and his disciples, will solve me this enigma, I promise him more fame than Oedipus ever acquired by solving the riddle of the Theban Sphinx. It is out of all question. The Unitarian Orators who blazon the virtues and good deeds and glorious achievements of our Pilgrim fathers, feel obliged to throw off the shackles which men of Dr. Channing's stamp would impose upon them-not to say (which would be somewhat indecorous) give the lie to all accusations of that nature. Since the world was created, a higher, nobler race of true LIBERTYMEN never lived upon it than CALVINISTS.

Where (in the language of one of our most potent orators) was "the first considerable Church established in modern times, without a bishop, and State without a king?" Was it not at Geneva, and under the auspices of Calvin ? That little Republic, built up by his wisdom, and consolidated by his discretion and true love of liberty, has stood amidst the wrecks of kingdoms around it, respected by all the world, and the abode of freedom, until Unitarians forced the government of it to be put into their hands; and since that time, it has become the abode of oppression and violence.

Who does not know, that the English exiles learned at Geneva their notions of true religious liberty, which they carried home from thence, and which in the end dethroned the hypocritical and domineering Charles 1., and breathed the air of freedom over the whole kingdom, from John o' Groats' to the Land's End? At this eventful period, our Republic sprang into existence. The Liberty-men in question were its founders. A noble building did they erect. If the Corinthian and the Composite did not pervade its original architecture, it exhibited, and still exhibits, in its grandeur and massive strength, the Doric and the Palmleaf column. Who dares to rail at these men, now, among us? I was ready to say: Not even a dog moves his tongue. But no; I find that 1 must recall this. There is at least one man, once I believe a minister of the Gospel in this State, (whether a native I know not), who has published even a volume to show, that the Pilgrim Fathers were actually all which Dr. Channing has so recently affirmed us to be. I understand, however, that he is on his journey to St. Peter's and

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in a fair way for a rapid and prosperous voyage thither. There too he will meet with those choice spirits, which in England have taken up the cowl that Ignatius Loyala bequeathed to all St. Peter's Elect-with Newman, and Ward, and a host of Oxford compeers-with others too of our own country, whose insignificance protects them from all exposure to the public. In that joyful throng, which are so soon to meet under that cracked dome, which is the wonder (if not the terror) of the world, they will doubtless raise their voices so high, as to fill the vaulted ceiling with the notes of a Te Deum for their wonderful deliverence from the bondage (not merely or principally of sin and Satan, but) of Calvinism and Orthodoxy, and their restoration to the glorious liberty of kissing the toe of St. Peter's successor, or at any rate, if they should fail of this, of kissing the toe of that statue, which was once the image of Jupiter Olympius in a heathen temple, but is now converted by baptismal water into a true and exact representation of Peter himself. All hail! to these choicest of the elect of the Vicar of God and St. Dominic! May they live a thousand and one years, and their shadows never be less! Live, I would say, in a monastery of their own-separate forever from the sacred soil of Liberty and of Orthodoxy!

But to return; nearly all political orators have too much tact to make open and public assaults upon the Pilgrims. Some of our pulpit orators and pamphlet and review-writers, have less of discretion and magnanimity. The names, indeed, of those venerated fathers are rarely called out in the way of reproach. The art of sagacious management consists, in throwing contumely and contempt over all that was distinctive in their religious opinions, without being suspected of such a design. It is only in this way that the descendants of the Pilgrims can be misled.

I make the challenge, then, openly and fearlessly, to all who tread under foot the religious Creed of our fathers—the challenge to show the consistency of what they affirm of all Orthodoxy, and of orthodox men as bigots, and unrelenting superstitious zealots, and advocates of religious oppression, and enemies to all freedom of inquiry and free religious action, with the high encomiums which they feel obliged to bestow on the civil and social institutions of the very men in question. There is no way of meeting this challenge. FACTS-facts that are before the whole world—contradict all which they affirm of the tendencies of Orthodoxy to suppress civil, social, or religious liber. ty. FACTS TESTIFY THAT THIS ACCUSATION IS NOT true.