Objection that the Romanists are Excluded,

Answered.

BUT here the objector meets us, and assumes that if the Bible be not excluded, the Romanists will, and that the Bible had better be shut out, than the Romanists shut out. To this it would be sufficient to say, that if the Bible be excluded, a vastly greater number who require the Bible, and have an unquestionable right to it, will be shut out, and that the Bible had better be admitted, than the friends of the Bible be excluded. Those who demand the Bible are ten to one compared with those who reject it; and those who would be conscientiously excluded from the schools, if the Bible were excluded, are at least five to one, compared with those who would be driven away by its admission. Yet the insulting demand

for its exclusion is a demand that for the sake of gratifying one million, and gathering in a portion of their children into schools from which religion is driven out, you shall disregard the rights of ten millions, and compel them either to establish other schools, or else to submit to an education for their children, from which the Bible and religious truths are expelled. Shall the two millions who reject the Bible, rule the twenty who require it, and shall the rights of the twenty be sacrificed to meet the prejudices of the two, or shall the vast and overwhelming majority be permitted to retain the Bible, without injury to the rights of any? Shall a very small minority be admitted to spoil an education for the majority, or shall the vast majority be admitted to vitalize and perfect an education for themselves and for all who will avail themselves of it? Shall the conscience of the majority or that of the minority rule? We have already settled that question.

There are two false assumptions in the objection; first, that if the Bible be not excluded the Romanists will be shut out; and second,

that if the Bible be excluded, you can in that way induce them to come in. They will neither be shut out by admitting the Bible, nor will they be drawn in by excluding the Bible. They wish, indeed, to get the Bible out, and so to do the schools all the injury in their power; but those who oppose the Bible have no intention of supporting the free school system at any rate. The Bible of the schools is not the source of their objection to them, but the freedom of the schools, and the intermingling of Romish and Protestant children, in such a manner as to break down these barriers of cast and prejudice, by which a churchdespotism is so powerfully sustained. Their effort against the Bible is but a battering-ram or Roman Testudo, under cover of which they advance against the whole system, and mean to break it up.

Besides, the Romanists are not shut out, in any case, but have perfect freedom of admission, if they will. If Haman and Mordecai are both invited to the king's feast, and if Haman, coming to the door, finds that Mordecai is to be one of the guests, and indeed sees him

just entering on the other side of the way, and retires in a huff, saying, I will not be present at the same feast with Mordecai, nor eat salt with him, whose fault is it? Who makes the exclusion? Can he justly say that the king has shut him out, because Mordecai was invited? It is his own angry, envious, and inimical feelings that have shut him out; and was it the duty of the king to legislate in behalf of those injurious feelings, or to set up new sumptuary regulations to please his malice? Are hatred and prejudice proper things to be fostered and protected by legislation, which, at the same moment that it protects and sustains the prejudice, legislates against those who happen to be its unfortunate objects.

Moreover, let us next see what use the Romanists themselves would make of this exclusion. They demand the Bible to be shut out, on the pretence that it is a bad book, a sectarian book, a Protestant book. Accordingly, you put the excommunicating brand upon it, and shut it out. What language does that prohibition speak to the children? What

will the Romish parents and the priests say to the youthful members of their flocks, when they desire to guard them against the Bible? What could they ask, for argument against it, better than this fact, that it is not permitted to be read or taught in schools? My children, they may say, it stands to reason, that if the Bible were a good book, they who tell you that it is, would permit it to be taught to their children. But the Protestants themselves have shut it out; they do not suffer it to be read, and of course it cannot be fit to be read. A book of their own, which even the Protestants excommunicate, must be a bad book indeed! Never touch it!

Then again, to others they will say, Behold these godless schools! These Protestants have a religion, which they have the impudence to assert is better than ours, and yet they dare not teach it to their children! It can surely not be deemed very sacred by those, who on considerations of expediency, consent to keep it from their children, consent to excommunicate it from the public schools. Godless, atheistic, worthless! We will have