so brutally ignorant as some would imagine. When, therefore, we hear
them speak of our _institutions_ being in danger, they mean the
_institutions_ of heresy and sectarianism; namely, parsons, and their
wives and children, and countless sects and contradictions in
creed--institutions that, sure enough, are in imminent danger, and
doomed to fall before the irresistible and unerring progress of
Catholicity. But will this divinely decreed result be injurious to the
progress or prosperity of the republic? On the contrary, there can never
be a real union among the States till the minds of the people, north and
south, are united in faith and sentiment. And by the annihilation of
sectarianism and its castes, the people will be freed from a very
burdensome tax now going to the support of a large and lazy body of men,
women, and children, whose only object in existence seems to be to eat
and consume, and who, besides, by their idleness and habits, keep up a
system of detraction, jealousy, and discord among otherwise
well-disposed citizens, that, like so many cancers, are eating into the
very vitals of the public morals. Let not the American citizen,
therefore, bewail the certain decline and rapid decay of the
_institutions_ of sectarianism, but rather pray for the dawn of that
glorious approaching day when, as we are but a one people and a united
nation, we may have but one religion, and a country that will know no
sectional divisions.




CHAPTER XVII.

"HE AND HIS WHOLE HOUSE BELIEVED."