and diffuse doctrines which I believe the Bible has condemned? There may be wisdom in such laws, but we defy the advocates of free trade and of equal rights to prove them consistent with their own creed.

9. The popular defence of these taxes is remarkable-As a nation, it is held, we have approved them; they, therefore, who think them wrong ought to leave the community, as their fathers did. They at least, not compelled to continue in a country whose laws, as they think, are so flagrantly unjust.

are,

Now, granting that it were-possible for nine millions of people to expatriate twelve millions of their countrymen, and-just that they should be compelled to dispose of their trade and property for their conscientious views, at a serious loss, and-wise to banish so many of the firmest friends of constitutional liberty whom our country has ever known, it is still somewhat difficult to resist the impression, that this system surely has not been framed for the advantage of religion, for the salvation of the very persons whom you would thus deprive of its blessings. The Romanists of Ireland have refused tithes for the support of protestantism, whose sole end is their conversion to the protestant faith: will you promote the object of this institution by transporting them to Mexico or Spain? The dissenters of England cry

loudly against the injustice of religious taxes-taxes instituted for the express purpose of making and keeping them and their children Christians: will that purpose be answered by sending them to add to the numbers and alleged destitution of the voluntaryism of America? Either let us hear no more of the privileges of dissenters in being allowed to follow their pilgrim-fathers, or let us be told plainly, that establishments are not for the salvation of the body of the people, but for the comfort and secular advantage of their own members.

10. The philosophic defence of them is scarcely more pertinent, and certainly less candid. The common minds of our nation get rid of the objection of injustice by allowing the alternative of banishment; the philosopher answers it by denying the justness of the transference of the principles of free trade in business to free trade in Christianization, and on this ground— that between the spiritual appetite of men for religious truth and their physical appetite for the necessaries or the luxuries of life there is no resemblance. The want of food creates the appetite of hunger, and hunger seeks to be appeased; but ignorance creates no appetite for knowledge, no hungering and thirsting after truth, no spontaneous movement towards instruction; and therefore, it is held, though the one appetite may be left alone to seek its own gratifica

tion, the other must be stimulated before it will seek to be supplied.

*

11. The reality and the justness of this distinction no one can for a moment hesitate to allow. Christians of every name have long been familiar with the melancholy facts on which it is founded, and as Christians have acted upon them. Unhappily, however, it proves nothing relatively to the duty of the government. It is true that because for articles of trade demand and supply may be left alone to adjust themselves, therefore government need not interfere with them; but it is by no means a necessary consequence of this principle, that because for the truths of religion demand and supply cannot safely be left alone, therefore they must be supported and diffused by the go

vernment.

The first argument is conclusive:

Wherever demand and supply can safely be left to their own adjustment, no one need interfere with them.

But in trade they may be left to their own adjust

ment.

Therefore, no one need interfere with them.

* Such is an argument that has received no mean support in our own time: Dr. Chalmers and Lord Brougham have been in the habit of repeating it for some years. See CHALMERS, on The Use and Abuse of Literary and Ecclesiastical Endowments: Glasgow,

1827.

40

OF THE INJUSTICE

The second argument is deceptive:

Wherever demand and supply cannot safely be left

to their own adjustment, some one must interfere with them.

But in religion they cannot safely be left to their adjustment.

Therefore, government must needs interfere with them.

The first conclusion is logically true; the second, it will be seen, is logically false: "no one" certainly excludes the members of the government; while "some one" of the second syllogism does not necessarily include them. To make this celebrated distinction at all available, we must adopt for the first premiss a proposition notoriously false-viz., “With whatever cannot well be left alone government must interfere;" or, for the second, some proposition that takes as granted the whole question at issue between the advocates of state establishments and ourselves.

12. Besides, we deny that this distinction affects our reasoning; and to urge it in defence of state endowments implies a forgetfulness of the very foundation on which the free-trade system rests. Its grand principle is, not the uselessness of government interference in exciting or regulating demand, but its essential injustice if it be excited or regulated by a public tax; so that the two cases are not different in

the only one feature in which a government should regard them. It is a matter of secondary importance whether the pistoles go to the poor-box of the church or to the treasure-box of the brigand company, who have murdered to obtain them; the one appropriation may be more "blessed" than the other, but neither will make reparation to the injured law, or can possibly be accepted by Him who loves mercy and hates robbery for a burnt offering. A tax for my neighbour's religion, be it paid in money or in blood, is at least as unrighteous as a tax for my neighbour's opium, or my neighbour's wine. It is a legalized theft, or a legalized murder; and to assert that it is less useless is but "faint praise," if it be not shewn to be more just.

13. It is, in fact, this injustice which, as much as anything else, clothes the whole question with a most momentous importance. Were our own privileges alone concerned, we would willingly forego them; but when we remember that besides, there are involved the common rights of men, the interests of our common humanity, the purity of religion, the peace of the church, the salvation of the impenitent, the acceptableness even of our own worship, we feel that to claim our privileges as men is to do our duty as Christians, and that present struggles alone can secure permanent peace. The system has lashed a whole nation into rebellion,-and who knows not that