but because it is indestructible and unassailable. As I would not misrepresent, and do not understand this process of reasoning, I must leave it to some other

commentator.

The rights of conscience, the liberty of conscience, are, in fact, but synonyms, all expressing the same general sentiment, that every man has the right to follow the dictates of that moral guide, so far as he is not prohibited by law, either divine or human, and that it is the duty of every government to abstain from all interference with this right, unless in cases fairly involving the peace and good order of society. The enjoyment of this freedom, in this sense, has been one of the great objects of wise men in all ages, and is especially so in this, wherever the first notions of liberty have penetrated. But it will be remarked, that this use of the term "freedom" is rather a jus et norma loquendi than a strict application of it in its true meaning. Freedom cannot be predicated of a faculty of the mind or body. It belongs to the sentient being. Freedom of speech is the freedom of a man to speak, not the mere command of the vocal organs. Freedom of action, to act. Freedom of conscience, to obey and be governed by the dictates of that great monitor. A man is a free agent, if all his powers and faculties are unrestricted; otherwise he is not free; always excepting, however, proper legal restraints from the class of injurious restrictions.

This somewhat metaphorical application of these terms cannot be made the foundation of a great moral deduction. But Archbishop Hughes has made them so, and maintains that freedom is so essential an attribute of conscience that without it the faculty itself would cease to exist, but that being indestructible, its indestructibility is a proof of its freedom. It is obvious that he is here referring to the free agency of the faculty, and not of the sentient being of whose intellectual powers it forms part; for he will not deny, no one will deny, that the individual himself may be deprived of almost every attribute of free agency.

The Archbishop kindly accounts for, and charitably excuses, my erroneous views on this subject, by the "confusion of ideas" resulting from ignorance of his great moral discovery of the difference between freedom of conscience and freedom of action, in obedience to its dictates. I can accept neither the charge nor the excuse. Though, indeed, my participation in this assumed logical heresy is of no consequence, nor would my conviction of it furnish the least ground, even of self-complacency, for beyond me is the opinion, I may say, of the world, that this priceless freedom is the freedom of action, as well as of opinion, and in conformity with it the sentiment itself is embodied in our Con

stitutions and State papers, and is embalmed in the hearts of the American people, and it is to be found, as a self-evident truth, even in the school-books which form the minds of our youth. One of the purest of our patriots, one of the wisest and most accomplished of our statesmen, the virtuous Madison, has left his testimony upon record in opposition to this new assumption, in his inaugural address in 1809, in which he enumerates among our fundamental principles the duty of avoiding "the slightest interference with the rights of conscience," not the abstract right of thinking, but the practical right of deciding upon moral convictions, and of acting accordingly. And who that knew James Madison will dare to talk of the confusion of his ideas?

To multiply specific examples of the use and true meaning of this phrase would be a profitless and uncalled-for task, and I shall not undertake it. shall content myself with four other authorities, all of which have peculiar claims to the consideration of Archbishop Hughes. One is the celebrated jurist Vattel, who, while maintaining, agreeably to the fashion of his age, the right of the sovereign to establish a State religion, and to make that the only one openly professed, earnestly reprobates all attempts to compel men to conform to it by municipal laws, and finally remarks:

"It must, then, be concluded, that liberty of conscience is a natural and inviolable right. It is a disgrace to human nature that a truth of this kind should stand in need of truth."

What is this liberty of conscience, thus inviolable, and the denial of which is so sternly rebuked? Not Archbishop Hughes's power of thinking - for no man in his senses ever denied that; but it is "freedom from compulsion "these are the words of the author without which this moral agent, inviolable as it should be, is violated, "to the disgrace of human nature."

(From a speech delivered in the United States Senate, May 15, 1854.)

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*

The Pilgrim Fathers.

By ROBERT CHARLES WINTHROP, of Massachusetts.
(Born 1809, died 1894.)

HEN I behold a feeble company of exiles, quitting the strange land to which persecution had forced them to flee; entering with so many sighs and sobs and partings and prayers on a voyage so full of perils at the best, but rendered a hundredfold more perilous by the unusual severities of the season and the absolute unseaworthiness of their ship; arriving in the depth of winter on a coast to which even their pilot was a perfect stranger, and where "they had no friends to welcome them, no inns to entertain them, no houses, much less towns, to repair unto for succor," but where instead of friends, shelter, or refreshment - famine, exposure, the wolf, the savage, disease, and death, seemed waiting for them; and yet accomplishing an end which royalty and patronage, the love of dominion and of gold, individual adventure and corporate enterprise had so long essayed in vain, and founding a colony which was to defy alike the machinations and the menaces of tyranny, in all periods of its history it needs not that I should find the coral pathway of the sea laid bare, and its waves a wall on the right hand and on the left, and the crazed chariot-wheels of the oppressor floating in fragments upon its closing floods, to feel, to realize, that higher than human was the power which presided over the exodus of the Pilgrim Fathers!

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Was it not something more than the ignorance or the self-will of our earthly and visible pilot, which, instead of conducting them to the spot which they had deliberately selected the very spot on which we are now assembled, the banks of your own beautiful Hudson, of which they had heard so much during their sojourn in Holland, but which was then swarining with a host of horrible savages-guided them to a coast which, though bleaker and far less hospitable in its outward aspect, had yet, by an extraordinary epidemic, but a short time previous, been almost completely cleared of its barbarous tenants? Was it not something more, also, than mere mortal error or human mistake, which, instead of bringing them within the limits prescribed in the patent they had procured in England, directed them to a shore on which they were to land

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upon their own responsibility and under their own authority, and thus compelled them to an act which has rendered Cape Cod more memorable than Runnymede, and the cabin of The Mayflower than the proudest hall of ancient charter or modern constitution the execution of the first written original contract of Democratic Self-Government which is found in the annals of the world. But the Pilgrims, I have said, had a power within them also. If God was not seen among them in the fire of a Horeb, in the earthquake of a Sinai, or in the wind cleaving asunder the waves of the sea they were to cross, he was with them, at least, in the still, small voice. Conscience, conscience, was the nearest to an earthly power which the Pilgrims possessed, and the freedom of conscience the nearest to an earthly motive which prompted their career. It was conscience which weaned them from the delicate milk of their mother country, and inured them to the difficulties of a strange land." It was conscience which made them not as other men, whom small things could discourage, or small discontentments cause to wish themselves at home again. It was conscience that "robur et aes triplex circapectus" which emboldened them to launch their fragile bark upon a merciless ocean, fearless of the fighting winds and lowering storms. It was conscience which stiffened them to brave the perils, endure the hardships, undergo the privations of a howling, houseless, hopeless desolation. And thus, almost in the very age when the Great Master of human nature was putting into the mouth of one of his most interesting and philosophical characters that well-remembered conclusion of a celebrated soliloquy:

"Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought;

And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard, their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action,"

this very conscience, a clog, and an obstacle, indeed, to its foes, but the surest strength and sharpest spur of its friends, was inspiring a courage, confirming a resolution, and accomplishing an enterprise, to which the records of the world will be searched in vain to find a parallel. Let it never be forgotten that it was conscience, and that not intrenched behind broad seals, but enshrined in brave souls, which carried through and completed the long-baffled undertaking of settling the New England coast.

(Being part of an address before the New England Society in 1839.)