Then The
Americans Become As To Religion, What They Are As To Country, Allied
To All.
In them the name of Englishman, Frenchman, and European is
lost, and in like manner, the strict modes of Christianity as
practised in Europe are lost also.
This effect will extend itself
still farther hereafter, and though this may appear to you as a
strange idea, yet it is a very true one. I shall be able perhaps
hereafter to explain myself better; in the meanwhile, let the
following example serve as my first justification.
Let us suppose you and I to be travelling; we observe that in this
house, to the right, lives a Catholic, who prays to God as he has
been taught, and believes in transubstantiation; he works and raises
wheat, he has a large family of children, all hale and robust; his
belief, his prayers offend nobody. About one mile farther on the
same road, his next neighbour may be a good honest plodding German
Lutheran, who addresses himself to the same God, the God of all,
agreeably to the modes he has been educated in, and believes in
consubstantiation; by so doing he scandalises nobody; he also works
in his fields, embellishes the earth, clears swamps, etc. What has
the world to do with his Lutheran principles? He persecutes nobody,
and nobody persecutes him, he visits his neighbours, and his
neighbours visit him. Next to him lives a seceder, the most
enthusiastic of all sectaries; his zeal is hot and fiery, but
separated as he is from others of the same complexion, he has no
congregation of his own to resort to, where he might cabal and
mingle religious pride with worldly obstinacy.
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