rt of Common Pleas of Chester
county (New York) a few days since rejected a witness who declared his
disbelief in the existence of God. The presiding judge remarked that
he had not before been aware that there was a man living who did not
believe in the existence of God; that this belief constituted the
sanction of all testimony in a court of justice, and that he knew of
no cause in a Christian country where a witness had been permitted to
testify without such belief."]

The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so
intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive
the one without the other; and with them this conviction does not spring
from that barren traditionary faith which seems to vegetate in the soul
rather than to live.

I have known of societies formed by the Americans to send out ministers
of the Gospel into the new Western States to found schools and churches
there, lest religion should be suffered to die away in those remote
settlements, and the rising States be less fitted to enjoy free
institutions than the people from which they emanated. I met with
wealthy New Englanders who abandoned the country in which they were born
in order to lay the foundations of Christianity and of freedom on the
banks of the Missouri, or in the prairies of Illinois. Thus religious
zeal is perpetually stimulated in the United States by the duties of
patriotism. These men do not act from an exclusive consideration of the
promises of a future life; eternity is only one motive of their devotion
to the cause; and if you converse with these missionaries of Christian
civilization, you will be surprised to find how much value they set upon
the goods of this world, and that you meet with a politician where you
expected to find a priest. They will tell you that "all the American
republics are collectively involved with each other; if the republics of
the West were to fall into anarchy, or to be mastered by a despot,
the republican institutions which now flourish upon the shores of the
Atlantic Ocean would be in great peril. It is, therefore, our interest
that the new States should be religious, in order to maintain our
liberties."

Such are the opinions of the Americans, and if any hold that the
religious spirit which I admire is the very thing most amiss in America,
and that the only element wanting to the freedom and happiness of the
human race is to believe in some blind cosmogony, or to a