The Deist and the Atheist have their rights of conscience; and as they both claim conscientiously to deny that there is any such thing as a revelation from God, and one party that there is a God, they may claim also that the use of any book in the common schools that teaches the being of a God, or admits the existence of a revelation from him, does violence to their conscience. The use of Paley's Natural Theology, or of any reading-book that has a single selection from it, or any work that refers to the Word of God as are velation, or any lesson that inculcates any truth or moral precept on the authority of God's Word, or on the ground of God's perfections, is as truly a violation of conscience, as the use of the Bible.

If it be asserted that the use of the Bible is an infraction of religious liberty, then, on precisely the same grounds, only with greater force and directness, it may be urged that the use of Murray's Sequel, with its admirable extracts from Addison, Johnson, Beattie, Blair, Young, and other writers, is an infraction of religious liberty; for these extracts not

only refer to the Bible as the Word of God, and the best of all books, but even assert and enforce its peculiar teachings, with references to it, and quotations from it; so that the asserted rule that a perfect religious liberty requires that an impartial system of public education should be free from any religious bias, is set at naught and contravened in the most pointed manner. In fact, Divine Providence has so wrought in the production of our literature, that it would be a task almost impracticable to construct a single good reading-book from writers of the best style, and in so doing to exclude the element of religion, or a religious bias, as founded on the sanctions of God's Word. Morality itself cannot be taught without Christianity, unless you shut up up the manufacturers of your school books to Pagan and Mohammedan literature. But all assertion and teaching of the Word of God, as being the Word of God, all reference to it as a Divine authoritative revelation, all appeal to it, or to God's will, as the foundation or sanction of moral truth, is, by this pretended rule of conscience and of religious liberty, intolerant

and wrong, an infringment of the rights of individual consciences.

Suppose I am a conscientious Deist. I desire, as I pay my tax for the support of the public schools, to avail myself of the privilege for which I am taxed, for the education of my children. I present myself with them. at the door of a free public school, but am met by a committee with a book in their hands designed to teach the art of reading, and at the same time to form the taste, style, and habit of thought in the pupil, in the best possible manner. That book contains a section on the excellence of the Holy Scriptures. The very title is an offense to my conscience. when, farther than this, I find the Scriptures referred to as beyond all question the Word of God, a revelation from Heaven for our guid ance, with an absolute denial that the soul can be saved without it; and when I find perhaps in some other section, an attractive and beautiful description of the evidences of Christianity, or the grounds on which it is proved conclusively that the Bible is the Word of God; I say to myself, this is an outrage on my

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rights, a violation of the first principles of religious liberty. I cannot suffer my children to be educated at a school where the instructions I give them at home receive the lie, where they are taught that all that I have taught them is false.

But the committee tell me : sir, this book is one of the best class books in our Public Shcool System, admitted to be so by all, and has been from time immemorial, or ever since its compilation, in constant use without the slightest objection. And unless you will consent to have your children instructed from this book, they cannot enter; for it would be fatal to all order and authority in the school, if the pupils are permitted at every freak of opinion in their parents, to transgress the appointed discipline, or refuse the accustomed lessons.

"Well," I answer, "this is an oppression of my conscience. I would rather have the Word of God itself read, or what you call the Word of God, than these alluring praises of it, and pretended demonstrations of its divine origin." And I have the right of it, if the assumed premises in regard to any "religious

bias," or use of the Bible in schools, being an infraction of religious liberty, are admitted as correct. I am, in such a case, deprived of any common benefit of Government, because of my religious faith. I am a poor persecuted Deist, oppressed in my rights and liberties, as a citizen, by the very Government which I support for the protection of both. I am shut out from the public schools, although compelled to pay for the support of them, because the government in them is daring to assume the control of my children's opinions. You are intolerant by system, and you compel me to keep my children at home.

Now, on the assumed necessity of a perfect indifference as to religious truth and error, assuming for belief and unbelief, Theism and Atheism, Deism and Christianity, the same à priori claims, the same authority, the same right, or, in other words, assuming that a system of public education, to be impartial, müst have no religious bias, and that the Scriptures, as the Word of God, must be excluded, and absolutely ignored, the argument of the Deist is irresistible.