s to some of the ends of civil government, all people are agreed. That
it is designed to protect our persons and our property; that it is
designed to compel us to satisfy our wants, not by rapine, but by
industry; that it is designed to compel us to decide our differences,
not by the strong hand, but by arbitration; that it is designed to
direct our whole force, as that of one man, against any other society
which may offer us injury; these are propositions which will hardly be
disputed.

Now these are matters in which man, without any reference to any higher
being, or to any future state, is very deeply interested. Every human
being, be he idolater, Mahometan, Jew, Papist, Socinian, Deist, or
Atheist, naturally loves life, shrinks from pain, desires comforts which
can be enjoyed only in communities where property is secure. To be
murdered, to be tortured, to be robbed, to be sold into slavery, these
are evidently evils from which men of every religion, and men of no
religion, wish to be protected; and therefore it will hardly be disputed
that men of every religion, and of no religion, have thus far a common
interest in being well governed.

But the hopes and fears of man are not limited to this short life and to
this visible world. He finds himself surrounded by the signs of a power
and wisdom higher than his own; and, in all ages and nations, men of all
orders of intellect, from Bacon and Newton, down to the rudest tribes of
cannibals, have believed in the existence of some superior mind. Thus
far the voice of mankind is almost unanimous. But whether there be one
God, or many, what may be God's natural and what His mortal attributes,
in what relation His creatures stand to Him, whether He have ever
disclosed Himself to us by any other revelation than that which is
written in all the parts of the glorious and well ordered world which He
has made, whether His revelation be contained in any permanent record,
how that record should be interpreted, and whether it have pleased Him
to appoint any unerring interpreter on earth, these are questions
respecting which there exists the widest diversity of opinion, and
respecting some of which a large part of our race has, ever since the
dawn of regular history, been deplorably in error.

Now here are two great objects: one is the protection of the persons and
estates of citizens from injury; the other is the propagation of
religious truth. No two objects more entirely distinct ca