eligion, they look upon their contemporaries with dread, and
they recoil in alarm from the liberty which their fellow-citizens are
seeking to obtain. As unbelief appears to them to be a novelty, they
comprise all that is new in one indiscriminate animosity. They are at
war with their age and country, and they look upon every opinion which
is put forth there as the necessary enemy of the faith.

Such is not the natural state of men with regard to religion at the
present day; and some extraordinary or incidental cause must be at
work in France to prevent the human mind from following its original
propensities and to drive it beyond the limits at which it ought
naturally to stop. I am intimately convinced that this extraordinary and
incidental cause is the close connection of politics and religion.
The unbelievers of Europe attack the Christians as their political
opponents, rather than as their religious adversaries; they hate the
Christian religion as the opinion of a party, much more than as an
error of belief; and they reject the clergy less because they are the
representatives of the Divinity than because they are the allies of
authority.

In Europe, Christianity has been intimately united to the powers of
the earth. Those powers are now in decay, and it is, as it were, buried
under their ruins. The living body of religion has been bound down
to the dead corpse of superannuated polity: cut but the bonds which
restrain it, and that which is alive will rise once more. I know not
what could restore the Christian Church of Europe to the energy of its
earlier days; that power belongs to God alone; but it may be the effect
of human policy to leave the faith in the full exercise of the strength
which it still retains.

How The Instruction, The Habits, And The Practical Experience Of The
Americans Promote The Success Of Their Democratic Institutions

What is to be understood by the instruction of the American people--The
human mind more superficially instructed in the United States than in
Europe--No one completely uninstructed--Reason of this--Rapidity with
which opinions are diffused even in the uncultivated States of the
West--Practical experience more serviceable to the Americans than
book-learning.

I have but little to add to what I have already said concerning the
influence which the instruction and the habits of the Americans exercise
upon the maintenance of their political institutions.

America has hither