ABSTRACT
The government forcibly takes a citizen's money for the support of a national church, it is guilty of infringing the rights it ought to maintain-of trespassing upon that freedom to exercise the faculties which it was commissioned to guard. The principle is applied in general terms, we find that a government cannot undertake the teaching of religious faith without either directly reversing its function, or partially incapacitating itself for the performance of that function. If it does not claim infallibility, it cannot in reason set up a national religion; and if, by setting up a national religion, it does claim infallibility, it ought to coerce all men into the belief of that religion. But there has been gradually dawning upon those who think, the conviction that a state-church is not so much a religious as a political institution. Nor, indeed, is the fact altogether denied, as you shall hear from some politic supporter of religious establishments during an after-dinner confidence.
