t of which he takes
care never to go. Within its limits he is the master of the mind;
beyond them, he leaves men to themselves, and surrenders them to the
independence and instability which belong to their nature and their
age. I have seen no country in which Christianity is clothed with fewer
forms, figures, and observances than in the United States; or where
it presents more distinct, more simple, or more general notions to the
mind. Although the Christians of America are divided into a multitude of
sects, they all look upon their religion in the same light. This applies
to Roman Catholicism as well as to the other forms of belief. There
are no Romish priests who show less taste for the minute individual
observances for extraordinary or peculiar means of salvation, or who
cling more to the spirit, and less to the letter of the law, than the
Roman Catholic priests of the United States. Nowhere is that doctrine of
the Church, which prohibits the worship reserved to God alone from
being offered to the saints, more clearly inculcated or more generally
followed. Yet the Roman Catholics of America are very submissive and
very sincere.

Another remark is applicable to the clergy of every communion. The
American ministers of the gospel do not attempt to draw or to fix all
the thoughts of man upon the life to come; they are willing to surrender
a portion of his heart to the cares of the present; seeming to consider
the goods of this world as important, although as secondary, objects.
If they take no part themselves in productive labor, they are at least
interested in its progression, and ready to applaud its results; and
whilst they never cease to point to the other world as the great object
of the hopes and fears of the believer, they do not forbid him honestly
to court prosperity in this. Far from attempting to show that these
things are distinct and contrary to one another, they study rather to
find out on what point they are most nearly and closely connected.

All the American clergy know and respect the intellectual supremacy
exercised by the majority; they never sustain any but necessary
conflicts with it. They take no share in the altercations of parties,
but they readily adopt the general opinions of their country and their
age; and they allow themselves to be borne away without opposition in
the current of feeling and opinion by which everything around them is
carried along. They endeavor to amend their contemporarie