Your recommendations are always welcome, for, indeed, the subjects of
them always merit that welcome, and some of them in an extraordinary
degree. They make us acquainted with what there is excellent in our
ancient sister State of Massachusetts, once venerated and beloved,
and still hanging on our hopes, for what need we despair of after the
resurrection of Connecticut to light and liberality. I had believed that
the last retreat of monkish darkness, bigotry, and abhorrence of those
advances of the mind which had carried the other States a century ahead
of them. They seemed still to be exactly where their forefathers were
when they schismatized from the covenant of works, and to consider as
dangerous heresies all innovations good or bad. I join you, therefore,
in sincere congratulations that this den of the priesthood is at length
broken up, and that a Protestant Popedom is no longer to disgrace the
American history and character. If by religion, we are to understand
sectarian dogmas, in which no two of them agree, then your exclamation
on that hypothesis is just, 'that this would be the best of all possible
worlds, if there were no religion in it.' But if the moral precepts,
innate in man, and made a part of his physical constitution, as
necessary for a social being, if the sublime doctrines of philanthropism
and deism taught us by Jesus of Nazareth, in which all agree, constitute
true religion, then, without it, this would be, as you again say,
'something not fit to be named, even indeed, a hell.
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