receive any such by surrender of your mental citadel, how are you going to get rid of all the insurmountable difficulties your own produced? Religion cannot possibly regard peculiar faith, no matter how blazoned by meretricious ornaments, as a rival, when she has plenipotent supremacy.

We must estimate the false glare of the world's treasures, powers and possessions, that influenced and perverted mind, that oppressed the world for the purpose, losing its equilibrium.

Rational religion must now restore it.

CHURCH MEMBERSHIP OF PECULIAR FAITH PAGANISM.

A LOOSE state of morals, arising from insincerity of more than a majority of members. it is said by good observers, evinces the relative state of peculiar faith doctrines throughout the world, from a want of truth at the foundation, and hence arise a general use of sophistry, and its attendant bigotry, among most of its professions of life.

What can all mortal messiahships avail the world, or those not absolutely rejecting, yet not adopting; not in the pale of safety, though belonging to the various churches? Millions thus neutralize their own good, taught certain family and church worship from youth, they do not dissent, yet in years of reflection and maturity they do not assert or avow the doctrines that they cannot conscientiously believe. They die, martyrs to custom of inherent nothing, abstracted from the true and essential belief, the eternal ever living Almighty, the universal Savior, because the universal Creator, having a power equal to his goodness.

Such persons neither adopt nor reject the doctrines of messiahship, but live and die good citizens, certainly no avowed believers, yet indebted to their Creator for every breath of life, and every elevation of mind, whom they overlook most ungratefully and irreverently.

Past teaching, and habit in such tuition, all over the world, thus present an immense number of the human family of doubtful change, yet preserved despite of all these circum-stances by their Creator.

Pride, habit, the wish for consistency, the institutions and laws of the world, fix the opinions but not the conscience in all false positions of education that asks for peculiar faith independent of reason.

The sincere faith, certainly the pure acquiescence of the mind, triumphs by reason, the only acceptable and worthy offering before its Organizer.

Church membership confers power; but

Each clique and sect cuts up society into clans, and curses it with its foul breath. God Almighty never made such a world.

Let sects and clans unmake and undo their deeds.

Trifles of mere puerile contention will be erased, because the corrupt base will be discarded.

Some sects look on others with perfect contempt, and hardly recognise them as anything at all; in fact, exclude them, as not orthodox, from communion.

But the eternal principles of universal brotherhood, which are those of God unmis-takably, admit all rational minds within the pale of safety. What a glorious position ! Here there can be no conflict, whether water by sprinkling or by immersion be the way, when the purity of the soul will be the acknowledged universal means of eternal safety.

There can be no contention whether the elect or any peculiar sect in place of all shall be saved, for no particular merits of the believers, as the leaders of all such doctrines, the originator of such faiths, are all sinful mortals, mere created beings, alike infatuated and corrupt, who pretend that universal safety is approachable to such that have rational minds on rational principles, through a rational God.

In peculiar faith there may be no end to trifles, as there is no end to mind's corruption when it is perverted. Mind is always subject to perversion, under influences arising from all power; and that of church power is too great to be missed.

Before God, what matters it whether some are excluded from communion with others in peculiar faith? God cannot recognise in the foundation any other than corruption?

SEVERANCE OF STATE FROM CHURCH.

BRIGHT was that day that American freedom saw a severance of state from charch That act constituted an element of popular power of mind, the richest in the annals of

rational religion, the noblest friend of man, that gives to freedom of mind all that is hers, the kindest for mind, the most triumphant for reason and God.

Rational religion yields this as a sacred right of the people, of mind, and reason, and God, and asks only for a rightful participation throughout the world. None better could have been done by wise statesmen for religion, as rational religion only asks for the good of souls for all past and present generations and posterity.

She asks for due and prompt atonement to be made for past errors accursed by the blood of millions, by aiding man to find the most direct path to his God, and to take away all means of mind's perversion.

If monotheism asked more or less, she would be unworthy of God's countenance and man's confidence. Of course, she asks to be independent of any corrupt priesthood. She does not wish any such to be her ministers.

The annals of this glorious day ought to be had in rememberance by the nations of the world, where civil and religious liberty has her votaries, and enlightened mind her friends.

It is a day that God blessed, and that freemen will consecrate with love and appreciation.

Her light was holy, and her atmosphere pure and vital. It will be known as one of the great days of freedom and rational religion.

The benefits shall go abroad on the earth, and the globe shall be blessed with their presence.

The mind of man and of the human race shall praise it, and honor its sacred name! The present age has witnessed that the papal Roman states had asserted their freedom, and had exchanged the errors of the past for the improvement of the present, having excluded their pontiff from temporal government, whose see was once so powerful by mind's delusion and infatuation, man's corruption and degradation, that its mandate governed much of the world, to the astonishment of subsequent ages.

But what availed the acts of these noble descendants of worthy patriotic sires, in their assertion of fundamental principles essential to the only kind of correct government, constitutional republican representation, clearly showing as a necessary consequence, that religious faith is truly placed in the minds of the people, not in the power or possession of assuming rulers, who are hostile to the best interests of the people, if those rulers be connected to speculation in rights and principles ?

But popish faith has not responded to true civil and religious liberty, and its malign influence has caused even a sister republic to aid in crushing with horrible inconsistency and iniquity, the birthright of freemen. This This is one of the execrable abominations of peculiar faith.

This is the most conclusive proof among hosts of all kinds not to be invalidated, that the peculiar faith of any sect, and under any form, is incompetent to the rights of man, and has nothing of religion.

Sectarianism so far from benefiting mind's rights, has crushed them with the iron heel of absolutism for the most part of her existence, after possession of power.

All proper blessings will redound to mind in a true republican constitutional government, excluding all shackles of any character on mind, that must be true to itself, to be true to God who made it.

All blessings will follow in order eventually, as the mind of man is more generally enlightened.

What a step Europe had already taken, under the example of her younger and energetic sister, America! Had the hundred millions of free-thinking people only been united, and used the appropriate moral and intellectual power, they had thereby effectually overcome all the malign influences of absolutism!

What a step the balance of the world has to take, to assert first principles, already enacted from the foundation of all things!

If all the world to-day, in its present state, could be in the church of partial and defective doctrines and peculiar faith, none could be assured of any nearer approach to a full and sacred fruition, from the character of the elements, that have no especial claim to him who created the purest, as all deny his purest Almighty attributes.

How can such believers face this supreme God, with just hopes, or conscientious minds? Their God is not the pure, perfect God of happiness! In fact, most are, from the essential character of their peculiar faith and worship, farther removed from God's approval, did he not take the will of the ignorant for the deed of the best enlightened.

The Creator, then, is the only being that can recognise the proper analysis of mind, and all its character. The best compliance with his requisitions, is the strictest conformity to the requisitions of his great principles. Thereby all other masters are necessarily ruled out.

Church membership opens, in its present organization, the door of temptation to corruption and hypocrisy, by giving decided preference and clanship to the members, without reference to merit.

Many are proved, by the best documents, to merely pretend to membership. Why so? They are doubters.

The conduct of several expels them, not only from church, but from society. Many stumbling-blocks remain.

But all such are arrayed in false character, many joining the church for sinister and worldly motives, become workers of iniquity under such a banner desecrated.

What can prevent it? Enlightened conscience will tell.

Priests and preachers' churches of peculiar faith are those of superstition and paganism, and their ways have been those of violence. Let not their acts cause any more curses on the world.

Their churches are mutually condemned by members of the same representative, who proves no diploma from God, fit for credence in any intelligent court of conscience, enlightened by reason and principle, either by his presence, in time or space, before the present world, where reason proves the Creator to be unmistakably prior to both, or the existence of creation.

The contentions of co-churches, under this representative, are endless, and bitterly antagonistic.

What but for worldly power do they feel hostile ?

Can they act thus for religion? That is impossible. Such is of the world, worldly. What is the world to all such, proving themselves thereby most amenable to correction, but for worldly considerations?

Who wonders, on the analysis of peculiar faith, that not only its sects are arrayed against each other, but that all the primary peculiarities of the world are deadly hostile to the death of all the other faiths?

Though some have begun to admit that others can teach the ignorant barbarians of the world some good, they will not admit that principles and truth are common, and are the appropriate sphere of mind, that sheds the light of the Universal Creator.

They will not admit the truth, that is adverse to their position, but direct the common property to secular and peculiar benefit.

The protestant leaves the mother church, as he asserts, on account of its articles of faith, and corruption, that is depraved action, growing out of that faith; and thus contends with co-equal protestant churches for demoralization of self-agency, and the possession of power over dissenters!

One church affects age for distinction, as if truth depended on years, and character rested on mere time.

It is to be regretted that the beauties of creation, the glories of immortal mind, are thus marred, in silencing mind, whose right to tell the whole truth is best and indisputable.

Let us not sacrifice, with blind infatuation, the noblest qualities of mind to the erroneous customs of the day, neither upheld by reason or light of philosophy.

What, has it come to this, that in the most enlightened age of the world, that the professors of peculiar faith cannot trust each other, all claiming a common vicegerent and representative of God, or affecting to claim? How can they expect the world to trust them?

The members of one church are afraid to trust their children at academies, perhaps rightfully too in most instances, to the tuition of teachers who are members of other churches.

As this distrust in several matters is very serious, it argues the absolute necessity of the world righting itself, the sooner the better, in all such matters, on universal principles, and then if there be difficulty in intrusting youth for education, depend upon it the objection is necessarily, conclusively and rightfully personal, which reason can be entirely valid with the world.

How can ministers give up their calling, their church power and possession, custom and supposed consistency, however forbid by paramount truth and wisdom, when power, reckless of justice, rarely yields at the last, not gracefully, but with vulgar resistance, especially after so much bloodshed by false faith, with all her horrid tortures and ignominy, her savage butchery in many ways?

When the wars that were engendered by and about church faith are referred to, as most barbarous and outrageous for even superstition, dark and ignorant, the greatest curses of the world, church members become indignant, if such be not ascribed to false faith. This admission uses up the whole category, having its exposure at last, that false faith, the very point we condemn, engendered the abuses.

When we convict of interminable abuses the whole spurious systems of faith, in the name of God, how can any such system be exempt from censure, as it has inherent elements of abuse? The elements of abuses are referable to the nature, the incurable nature of the systems, that must be eradicated.

The abuses of any system being unlimited as these, can only end in the system, no matter how modified.

A system that begins its foundations of libels on God's uprightness and attributes, engendering blasphemy, is full of evils only curable by its termination.

Are the conflicts of churches done with? Are all rightly settled? Are there no bristling bayonets to uphold any of its representatives over citizens seeking right government?

Are there no gorgeous salaries to enslave human rights?

Are there no poor people, with but little property, heavily taxed and burdened for its support?

Has peculiar church faith no peculiar interest with the state power?

Is there no exclusion of sister churches from equal rights and privileges? No desperate and ungodly bloody intrigues?

By what honorable standard can this measure of state-policy be instituted? Are not all social and religious principles violated?

Is not this certain proof of the acts of absolutism most complete? Is not all, the institution of ecclesiastical and monarchical despotism?

Do all church professors act for the pure love, unadulterated love, of the dear people? Do they then live without hire? Is it for the souls of the people, or the interests of the churchmen, and the despots, tyrants, kings and monarchs, that union of state and church is established?

If for the first, all is useless, as all such are vain.

By what authority is all this done, and still maintained?

Has not time corrected all such views as outrageous and hostile to the sovereign people, destitute entirely of religion?

If disinterested love were the case, why do not they prove the facts by absolute refusal of all pecuniary, church and state power? Let no intervening object cause the loss of sight of the one pure Being. How could the loudest professions be otherwise than very suspicious?

Has the question ever been submitted fairly to rational mind, by free investigation and inquiry, or rather has it not been scouted upon, and the investigators been libeled by priests and clergy, and all their vassals?

Have proper measures ever been taken to have the free people institute all researches and proper best means for mind to reach, by rational means, the true issue of this paramount subject, before a competent committee of disinterested citizens in convention?

Is this momentous question, the most important of the world in all its bearings, to be blindly passed by, and left to the incompetent and interested stock-jobbers of the world's morals to botch and tinker with for indefinite ages to come, without redress?

Is an intelligent and free people prepared to suffer all this in satisfaction, without saying their souls are God's?

Forbid it justice, peace, mind, reason, that are to be consulted.

True believers in God Almighty, of duty to man, with no church emoluments for their proper and satisfactory belief, could never begin to war therefor.

The thing is impossible, because fundamental principles prevent it.

The whole world, so far as rational religion is applicable, would then be in peace. Who would not go for such a glorious result?

Will your omission of duty, your neglect and silence longer prevail, to rebuke you for your priceless advantages?

You are one of a billion of voters at the ballot box of conscience, enlightened and liberal, to decide to-day for the settlement of this principle forever.

It is absurd to say that the people will not act on it.

That is the siren song of those that misled the people to their injury and wrong, to the interest of the leaders, who assume to think and act for, and dictate to the people. Let not that exploded doctrine be repeated before a self-governing people.

We seek to rid ourselves of all exploded doctrines of absolutism of church and state, and adopt the only safe principle of mind for the sovereign people.

No one can libel this position, to which none save tyrants are antagonistic, for the pursuit of right and title beyond doubt, otherwise that very position supposed of right is

error.

Freemen seeking such invaluable rights are antagonistic to none who are advocates of justice, honesty, and patriotism.

Counterfeits are not to be passed as pure jewels on them, or to their detriment. Freemen are of the billion to legislate on the pure currency of the world. All good citizens are thus interested, and intelligent freemen acknowledge none true but such as is of the right mint and genuine coinage.

The right stamp easily proves the genuine.

Again and again is the attention of all good citizens in life, of elevated and refined qualities, worthy of the world's respect, and of their race and kind, invoked to aid in sealing and closing the world-wide difficulties, conflicts of peculiar faith opinions, and the consequent interruptions of peace, in rescuing the state of society in its noblest base and object, in the exaltation of man's dignity, greatness, and happiness.

The end of religion is not church membership, clannish or sectarian, doubtful or visionary, but sound and substantial views, with definite and wisest prospect.

The Creator of all has vouchsafed the best co-operation in the institution of inherent principles, that distinguish man from animals, and elevate mind to soul from time to immortality, and that bespeak the union of all minds of conservative character.

As wide as the most conflicting differ, still the divine author is pre-eminently characterized by a universal virtue that can harmonize and tend to universal good and union on principle, and that alone.

On principle, man is linked to man, and all to their Creator, who thus endowed creation with self-preservation.

All the sects and denominations of the world can never unite but on one single platform, that of principles as universal as creation, to which all nations must look, and by which all wise ones will abide.

Come to this all must; the sooner the better; there is or can be no other.

God has instituted it, man must not usurp it.

Man is the worst of his race to deprive that race of it.

It is clear that the improved state of general mind needs an exalted system of civil and religious code, that may rally mankind to their true feeling and duty, to realize what all need universally.

Millions this day cold and indifferent in action, put on hostile feelings as to the points of faith that they are conscious are not of the true character for mind, are sensible that they owe allegiance only to their Creator, but they are silent when the still small voice of conscience speaks for that God.

It ought not so to be in any country, much less a free one, where at least free and open discussion should be elicited on all subjects, to rescue true thoughts and their originators.

But individual attempts are frowned down, their works are banished or libeled by impudent and outrageous arrogance, accompanied with as much assurance as if all were divine oracles, and that all decisions of exploded custom and men's opinions, were all right, and that lay freemen had not a sovereign right yet to be investigated, acted on, and matured by the only way of reaching the subject, the proper analysis of mind and its functions.

If religion be in the keeping of church membership, characterized by this spirit and faith, what is to become of the large majority who can never be professors to such creeds?

Why should there be masters of peculiar and partial creeds? Because mind is universal, not peculiar or partial, then faith, an action of the mind, must partake of mind's character.

No, it is not possible that man should be excluded from the pale of safety or society, because he cannot enter the pale of faith and church, believing most sincerely and truly in the only living God, ruler omnipotent.

He who believes in more, believes in a plurality of gods, and is compelled to admit a solecism, a contradiction, the existence of their Supreme, an Almighty, the Great First Cause. That great first cause has attributes beyond man's vain notions, and must command his highest deference.

Men's professions, independent of shining actions, that tell with unerring certainty, in the course of a long life, are never to be taken for granted until proved.

Mind cannot decide the whole question by professions, that wise men ought never to entertain exclusively.

Life is made up of professions and their practice, all to be estimated church or no church, duty in life is plain, not to induce evil, the negative and antagonist of good.

When we cannot safely take anything for granted in common matters of little moment, among many professors of the sects, how then can we expect safety in regard to the professions of hierarchy, that does not practice in unison, that is proved to be distrustful of itself, from youth to end of life, under the evils reflective on its character?