An opposition, in the mean
time, has been got up. That of our alma mater, William and Mary, is not
of much weight. She must descend into the secondary rank of academies of
preparation for the University. The serious enemies are the priests of
the different religious sects, to whose spells on the human mind
its improvement is ominous. Their pulpits are now resounding with
denunciations against the appointment of Doctor Cooper, whom they charge
as a monotheist in opposition to their tritheism. Hostile as these sects
are, in every other point, to one another, they unite in maintaining
their mystical theogony against those who believe there is one God only.
The Presbyterian clergy are loudest; the most intolerant of all sects,
the most tyrannical and ambitious; ready at the word of the lawgiver, if
such a word could be now obtained, to put the torch to the pile, and
to rekindle in this virgin hemisphere the flames in which their oracle
Calvin consumed the poor Servetus, because, he could not find in his
Euclid the proposition which has demonstrated that three are one, and
one is three, nor subscribe to that of Calvin, that magistrates have
a right to exterminate all heretics to Calvinistic creed. They pant to
re-establish, by law, that holy inquisition, which they can now only
infuse into public opinion. We have most unwisely committed to the
hierophants of our particular superstition the direction of public
opinion, that lord of the universe.
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