10 cise of our faculties, in performing these latter duties, that he has given us for the performance of the first. Nor is there any homage to God so acceptable as the upright heart and pure. He that loveth not his brother, whom he hath seen, how can he love God, whom he hath not seen ? The Puritan principle further involves the political equality of all men. Absolute rights arise out of the moral constitution of man. There is only one moral constitution of all men. The absolute rights of all men are therefore the same. Political equality is nothing else than the full enjoyment, by every member of the State, of the absolute rights which belong equally to all men. Any abridgment of that equality, on whatever consideration, except by discriminating justice in the punishment of crimes, is therefore forbidden to human government by the Divine authority. The Puritans so understood their own great principle, in its bearing upon the right of conscience. “Liberty of conscience (said one of their earliest organs) is the natural right of every man. * * * * He that will look back on past times, and examine into the true causes of the subversion and devastation of states and countries, will find it owing to the tyranny of princes and the persecution of priests. The ministers of the Established Church say, ‘ if we tolerate one sect, we must tolerate all.’ This is true. They have as good a right to their consciences as to their clothes or estates No opinions or sentiments of religion are cognizable by the magistrates, any further than they are inconsistent with the peace of civil government.” But this latitude of the principle of tolerance has been always vigorously and efficiently opposed by prejudice, pride, and bigotry, in every church, in every sect, in every State, and under every form of government. Each sect has claimed liberty of conscience for itself as a natural right, but with gross inconsistency, which invalidated its own argument, has denied that liberty to other sects—as if the Supreme Ruler had made men to agree, instead of differing, upon non-essential as well as upon essential articles of religious faith. The principle has nevertheless continually gained, and is still gaining, fresh triumphs. After a long contest in England, toleration was granted, to all but Roman Catholics and Jews. One hundred and fifty years after the organization of the Puritans, the principle entered into all the American constitutions. Fifty years later, it emancipated the Roman Catholics throughout Great Britain. Only a year ago, it removed the disfranchisement of the Jews in the British dominions. It has thus irrevocably become a part of the constitution of that great empire. The Puritan principle draws closely after it the consequence of an absolute separation of Church and State, for the reason that the toleration of conscience can in no other way be practically and completely established. That separation has been made in the American constitutions, with abundant advantage to both the cause of religion and the cause of good government. Great Britain is advancing steadily towards the adoption of the same broad, just, and beneficent policy. The separation of Church and State may therefore be regarded as a contribution made by the Puritans towards perfecting the art of government. The political equality of men has also met with obstinate resistance, and has also achieved many and auspicious triumphs. After one hundred and fifty years of controversy, it was carried into the British constitution by the judicial decision in Sommerset’s case, that a slave could not breathe the air of England. Ten or fifteen years later, it was theoretically adopted and promulgated in the Declaration of American Independence. The suppression of the African slave trade, by convention among the States of Christendom, transferred the same principle to the law of nations. The abolition of slavery by all the European nations, and, with few exceptions, also by all of the American States, is indicative of the universal adoption of the same great principle by all Christian nations, at some period not far distant. You are now prepared, I trust, for another and still more comprehensive view of the Purjtan principle, namely: that its full and perfect development is the pure system of republican government. Such was its marked tendency in. the beginning. “ A generous disdain of one man’s will,” says a truly philosophical writer, “is to Republics what chastity is to woman—a conservative
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