t that Government had made peace with Anti-Christ
in French Canada--a fact remembered to the permanent hurt of the
Confederacy when the French Canadians were afterwards invited to make
common cause with the American rebels. But the tide was too strong even
for Calvinists to resist; the equality of all religions before the law
was recognized in every State, and became, as it remains to-day, a
fundamental part of the American Constitution.

It may be added that America affords the one conspicuous example of the
Secular State completely succeeding. In France, where the same principles
were applied under the same inspiration, the ultimate result was something
wholly different: an organized Atheism persecuting the Christian Faith.
In England the principle has never been avowedly applied at all. In theory
the English State still professes the form of Protestant Christianity
defined in the Prayer-book, and "tolerates" dissenters from it as the
Christian States of the middle ages tolerated the Jews, and as in France,
during the interval between the promulgation of the Edict of Nantes and
its revocation, a State definitely and even pronouncedly Catholic
tolerated the Huguenots. Each dissentient religious body claims its right
to exist in virtue of some specific Act of Parliament. Theoretically it
is still an exception, though the exceptions have swallowed the rule.

Moreover, even under this rather hazy toleration, those who believe
either more or less than the bulk of their fellow-countrymen and who
boldly proclaim their belief usually find themselves at a political
disadvantage. In America it never seems to have been so. Jefferson
himself, a Deist (the claim sometimes made that he was a "Christian"
seems to rest on nothing more solid than the fact that, like nearly all
the eighteenth-century Deists, he expressed admiration for the character
and teaching of Jesus Christ), never for a moment forfeited the
confidence of his countrymen on that account, though attempts were made,
notably by John Adams, to exploit it against him. Taney, a Catholic, was
raised without objection on that score to the first judicial post in
America, at a date when such an appointment would have raised a serious
tumult in England. At a later date Ingersoll was able to vary the
pastime of "Bible-smashing" with the profession of an active Republican
wire-puller, without any of the embarrassments which that much better
and honester man, Charles Bradlaugh, h