But the gentleman from Gloucester has put to the House a puzzling interrogatory relative to the opinion that belief and disbelief are not altogether independent of the will, and has called upon us, if this be so, to will ourselves into a belief that he is five-and-seventy feet high! Well, Sir, I call upon him, in return, to be good enough to reason himself into such a belief, or to get at it in any way independent of the will. None but a madman certainly could ever entertain the idea. There is one step, however, which any man might take towards it; - he might will to say that he believed so. And if such a belief is to be considered analogous to a disbelief in deity, it only proves that disbelief ought rather to be called denial, and that there is really no such being as a sane, and yet sincere and conscientious infidel. But let us quit these abstractions and come back to the real questionbefore us.

We are told, Mr. Speaker, and the gentleman from Gloucester has entered into an elaborate argument to prove, that the existing rule of law is unconstitutional. A rule of law, Sir, which was in existence ages before the Constitution was adopted,— which has been in existence during the whole fifty years since it was adopted, and which must have been, all along, well known and understood by the Convention who framed, and by the People who ratified that Constitution, has at length in this day, and almost in this very hour, been discovered to be wholly at war with the true spirit and just construction of that sacred instrument! Parsons, Lowell, Sewall, Cushing, who afterwards so ably presided, Adams, Strong, Sullivan, Lincoln, who both before and afterwards so largely practised, in our highest courts, and to whom the rules of evidence were as familiar as household words, they all failed to comprehend, or forgot to vindicate, the principles of that Bill of Rights, which they had themselves so carefully framed! Mr. Speaker, the argument will not even bear to be stated; it perishes in the very utterance. Sir, there were brave men before Agamemnon. There were wise men before Solomon. And it is not too much to say, that there were men who could construe our Constitution and comprehend our liberties, before even the gentleman from Gloucester or myself. Yes, Sir, to use the language of Edmund

Burke, true ideas of liberty "were understood long before we were born, altogether as well as they will be after the grave has heaped its mould upon our presumption, and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law on our pert loquacity."

But, waiving an answer which to my mind is so conclusive, the gentleman has himself furnished us with a weapon which is equally fatal to his constitutional argument.

He has reminded us of that, indeed, which we all probably remembered for ourselves, that up to the year 1820 there existed a provision in our Constitution, that no man should enter these Halls of Legislation without making a previous declaration of his belief in the Christian Religion;-a provision which, for one, I heartily regret was ever struck out from that instrument. Well, now, Sir, the first and second articles of the Bill of Rights, upon which his argument has been mainly based, are entirely unchanged; they are precisely and literally the same as when they were first ratified by the people. These articles at their adoption, then, were entirely consistent with the religious test, as gentlemen insist upon calling it, which the Convention of 1820 abolished. No construction of them, certainly, is to be admitted, which would render them inconsistent with a provision which so long stood by their side, of equal authority and in the same instrument. And if they were consistent with this provision at their adoption, are they any the less so now? If it were proposed to re-insert this provision, would any gentleman have the face to say that it was unconstitutional, or inconsistent with the existing provisions of the Constitution? And if that declaration might still be required without any violation of the Bill of Rights, how much more such an expression of belief as the Bill before us would forbid ?

I confess, Sir, I am at a loss to conceive how any man, who has ever read our Constitution as originally framed, or as it now exists, can listen a moment to such an argument. If any thing be clearer than another on its face, it is, that it was intended to constitute a Christian State. I deny totally the gentleman's position, that the religious expressions it contains were intended only to show forth the pious sentiments of those who framed it. They were intended to incorporate into our system the principles

of Christianity,—-principles which belonged not only to those who framed, but to the whole people who adopted it. Sir, the people of that day were a Christian people; they adopted a Christian Constitution; they no more contemplated the existence of infidelity than the Athenian laws provided against the perpetration of parricide. They established a Christian Commonwealth; they wrote upon its walls, Salvation, and upon its gates, Praise; and Christianity is as clearly now its corner-stone, as if the initial letter of every page of our Statute Book, like that of some monkish manuscript, were illuminated with the figure of the Cross!

And yet, Sir, we are told that it is a mere quibble to interpret the phrase, "religious sentiments," in the second article of the Bill of Rights, in any other way than "sentiments about religion," — its truth or its falsity; and a gross equivocation not to admit atheists to be one of those "sects or denominations," of which "no subordination of any one to another shall ever be established by law!" Why, Mr. Speaker, if these views of our Constitution be correct, how is it that yonder Chaplain is suffered, morning after morning, to lift his voice in prayer in this hall, and to invoke the blessing of the Christian's God upon us and upon our labors? How is it that, week after week, a day is set aside for the worship of that God, and its solemn observance enjoined and enforced by our laws? How is it that profane and blasphemous words or writings concerning that God and his Gospel are punished as crimes against the State? Nay, the very system of oaths which our Constitution itself prescribes as the passports to every office which it creates,-why are they not abolished as interfering with the "unalienable rights" of man? Gentlemen seem to think that, because the declaration of belief in the Christian Religion is not now required in order to obtain admittance within these seats, there is no longer any exclusion. But the oath still remains, and there is no provision by which any person but Quakers can be permitted to affirm. It is clear then, that all persons except Quakers, who from any cause are incapable of taking an oath, are incompetent to the offices of government. They may, indeed, chicane themselves into them. They may go through the forms of the oath, and as

the Constitution now stands, perhaps no man can gainsay or resist them. But they must enjoy the satisfaction of knowing, that they violate the spirit and intent of the Constitution, in the very act by which they bind themselves to support it.

And here let me say, to those who so rigidly maintain the doc. trine that the inquiry into a man's religious belief, which this Bill proposes to abolish, is an interference between a man and his Maker, (a plea, by the way, which no atheist certainly will presume to set up for himself, since he acknowledges no Maker,)that the oath itself to which this inquiry is previous, is a tenfold greater interference, and that they take their exception at the wrong place. An oath is an acknowledgment of God. A compulsory oath is a compulsory acknowledgment of God. And those who submit to the administration of an oath, and yet refuse to submit to the previous inquiry, may fairly be said to "strain at a gnat and swallow a camel."

But it is a test. Well, Sir, and what if it is? I do not know that a thing is any the worse in itself for having an odious name applied to it. I admit that it is a test. And if gentlemen point me to the persecution and oppression of which tests have been the instruments in other ages and other climes, all I can say is, that this is not such a test. Because things may bear the same appellation, they are not necessarily the same or similar things, any more than it follows, because the gentleman from Gloucester and myself were christened alike, that he and I should necessarily advocate the same doctrines, or that I should be gifted with the same ingenuity and eloquence that he is. It is a test. But it is not a religious test, any more than it is a chemical test. It is a test of a man's capacity to take an oath, and that is the beginning, middle, and end of the whole matter.

Mr. Speaker, it seems to me that under the present system of oaths, this test, instead of being a persecution and oppression of an atheist, is a positive protection and favor to him, enabling him to escape from a ceremonial acknowledgment of a God in whom he does not believe. And why any Christian should object to it, I confess I am at a loss to conceive. There seems to be a morbid and mawkish sensibility in some men's minds upon this and other subjects, which if the law should regard, instead of

being as it is sometimes called, the perfection of human reason, it would become the mere patchwork of human whims.

But, says the gentleman from Cambridge, as the rule now stands, the atheist is an outlaw. From what right, Sir, or what privilege? I had generally supposed that to be a witness was an unpleasant and onerous duty, from which men were not sorry to be exempt. But an atheist may be murdered in the streets, or assassinated, or assaulted, when none but atheists are near, and how shall justice be administered in his behalf? Why, so may a Christian be injured or killed under precisely the same circumstances. And if the atheist be therefore an outlaw, we are all outlaws. You and I, Sir, may need the testimony of atheists as much as any of their own tribe. For myself, I am content to take the risk. But admitting that there may be some cases in which the rule will work hardly upon the atheist exclusively, whose fault is it? Who outlaws him? Has society withheld from him any of those means of religious knowledge and education which she has so liberally provided for others? Has God denied to him those inlets of truth and those influences of grace, which he has so freely bestowed upon the rest of his children? But I refrain from a topic on which I have already expressed an opinion.

It is a little curious, Mr. Speaker, that so much of this debate upon a subject so closely connected with the practice of our Courts, should have been taken up with a discussion of abstract principles. At the outset of the debate, indeed, nothing but these abstract principles was relied on in favor of the bill. Gentlemen gave us an abundance of "wise saws," but no " modern instances;" nor, indeed, ancient ones either, though the annals of infidelity seemed to have been raked back for centuries. During the last day or two, however, the discussion has assumed rather a more practical cast. And the friends of the Bill have exhibited to us some cases of the bad operation of the present rule. But, Sir, with one or two trivial and wholly unimportant exceptions, the cases are all supposed cases; the facts are all imaginary facts; the evils are all invented evils. And what is there under the sun, which will stand against such arguments? There is nothing so pure, nothing so holy, nothing so useful, no