I call it _Atheism by Establishment_, when any state, as such, shall not
acknowledge the existence of God as a moral governor of the world,--when
it shall offer to Him no religious or moral worship,--when it shall
abolish the Christian religion by a regular decree,--when it shall
persecute, with a cold, unrelenting, steady cruelty, by every mode of
confiscation, imprisonment, exile, and death, all its ministers,--when
it shall generally shut up or pull down churches,--when the few
buildings which remain of this kind shall be opened only for the purpose
of making a profane apotheosis of monsters whose vices and crimes have
no parallel amongst men, and whom all other men consider as objects of
general detestation and the severest animadversion of law. When, in the
place of that religion of social benevolence and of individual
self-denial, in mockery of all religion, they institute impious,
blasphemous, indecent theatric rites, in honor of their vitiated,
perverted reason, and erect altars to the personification of their own
corrupted and bloody republic,--when schools and seminaries are founded
at public expense to poison mankind, from generation to generation, with
the horrible maxims of this impiety,--when, wearied out with incessant
martyrdom, and the cries of a people hungering and thirsting for
religion, they permit it only as a tolerated evil,--I call this _Atheism
by Establishment_.
When to these establishments of Regicide, of Jacobinism, and of Atheism,
you add the _correspondent system of manners_, no doubt can be left on
the mind of a thinking man concerning their determined hostility to the
human race.
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