majority answer to the mission of public organs in the wider or circumscribed circles of their activity. In general, these organs and flambeaus, lighting the march of the people, according to their individual comprehensions, make efforts to point out the right way, to direct towards a higher moral and social goal. Considering the number of papers published in the United States, considering the absence of any restraint, the various countless interests, great and small, passions, excitements, irascibilities, and wranglings; the American press nevertheless redeems and dispels all the slanders directed by retrograde spirits against the, according to their assertions, irremediable abuse, licentiousness, and immorality of a press wholly free, and established for the exclusive use of the masses. In the position reached to-day in America and in Europe, most of the papers of this country, in truthfulness, purity of convictions and honesty, can fairly compare with their European kindred, to whom, by the combination of various governmental and social relations, scrupulous honesty, independenee and truthfulness become often almost impossible.

The ulterior destiny and significance of a free, enlightened and independent press, is intimately interwoven with the progressive moralization of society. The press is to become the paramount umpire, to prevent civil and unjust foreign wars, pacify irritations, suppress abuses, make them recede, and to a great extent disappear before the ever-pouring light of publicity. No question can be so complicated and explosive as not to become disentangled, mollified, in the free unprejudiced handling of it by the press. The envenomed question of slavery never could have reached such a degree of unscrupulousness, if the South had possessed a free press, if every opinion disa

greeing with slavery had not been suppressed, menaced with murder, by the violent and lawless pro-slavery partisans. The time may come, when society in both hemispheres, and even in its actual phases of development, will accept the press as the sole omnipotent authority.

CHAPTER X.

THE PULPIT.

RELIGIOUS liberty, the absolute separation of Church and State, has become realized in America far beyond the conception, and still more the execution, of a similar separation in any European Protestant country. This separation, and the political equality of all creeds, constitute one of the cardinal and salient traits of the American community. The equality of creeds in principle and in application, is not limited to the various Christian sects and confessions swarming over the Union; but partially in the sentiments of the people, as well in the spirit as the letter of the political institutions, it extends to other creeds. The Jewish confession, as in England and several European countries, does not disable its members from the enjoyment of any political rights; and there is no word in the constitution, by which any other worship, even a heathen one, could be legally proscribed. Not in indifference to religious convictions originated this religious liberty, but in the finally well understood and well applied principle of the freedom and equality of moral as well as of political rights.

Religious freedom and independence were almost paramount to all other aims and objects, which were had in view by the primitve emigrants to America. Puritans,

Huguenots, Irish Presbyterians, Quakers, came here with the purpose of establishing and enjoying the freedom of religious convictions. Thus this principle from the start was one of the cardinal germs and principal corner-stones of American civility. Intolerance, persecution, stained, however, even here the first pages of the Puritanic establishment. It was the momentary victory of the dark spirit of the past, overpowering at times the bright coruscations of truth. But bigoted ferocity finally yielded before the light of reason, before the vital and all-absorbing force of principles.

With the freedom of conscience, the pulpit constituted in the American social birth and growth, one of the most active and powerful moral and social elements and agencies. In the formation of nations and states, the germs, of whatever character and nature, that are once laid down at the foundations of society, and forming the sources of its fur ther development, preserve their vitality. They penetrate deeply, act and influence powerfully, the moral or the political unfolding and march. History is full of evidences of such vitality. The pulpit, therefore, which in the American primitive formation was such a cardinal and efficient element, of the same character as was the authority of a legislator, of a hero, a king, a caste, in the formation of ancient society or of European nations; the pulpit preserves here naturally and logically its uninterrupted action and influence upon the religious and the social man, both as a member of a religious communion, and as a citizen.

Religious influence has always made itself sensible, and mostly with great effect, in human affairs. It is a predisposition, a natural bent of the human mind, of human feelings. It is a positive, irrefutable, historical as well as psychological fact. Hierophants, high-priests, augurs, Brahmas, and uncounted other names, repre

senting this religious element in the formation of societies, evidence-it may be even for our times-its still unavoidable necessity. Any one, even half-way familiar with history, knows to what extent the three greatest historical nations of antiquity, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, have been religious; and what a preponderating influence worship exercised in their political, domestic, and national life. Among the principal reasons of the condemnation of Socrates by the Athenians, was his real or supposed disregard of gods. Even St. Simonism, this most powerful new social conception for the remodelling of society, and whose axioms and ideas, thrown into European culture, ferment therein more vigorously than those of other socialist doctrines, most of which have been engrafted on St. Simonism, this St. Simonism, albeit accused of materialism, asserts the religious idea to be the most elastic and durable social cement. The American populations, the descendants of the various primitive settlers, as well as the more recent immigrants, all are still eminently and in majorities, under the influence of religious ideas and feelings.

In the American community, the pulpit is an undeniable social element; it has grown with the community, it is a part of its free life, more so than in any European nation; it has participated in all the social or rather political transmutations and transitions. As the Church is wholly separated from any interference of the State, and its whole administrative organization is in the hands of the people, the pulpit belongs to the primordial manifestations of the self-government of the people. In the enjoyment of the plenitude of its right, the people by its choice, or by its deliberate, self-decided submission to the influence of the pulpit, authorizes its influence, authorizes its tendency to harmonize the inward with the outward man, to bring into union the worldly political acts and laws with the inward