Letters to the American People, on Christianity and the Sabbath (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: is necessarily carried in a greater or less degree into all the affairs of life, and is continually prompting to actual lying, and consequently to dishonesty, is very disgusting to a candid and honourable mind; and must he inwardly so to many of yourselves, American citizens. LETTER II. Citizens, ?I shall begin this letter by some considerations as to the utility of Christianity to government, being convinced it is the belief in its supposed utility, far more than in the actual truth of the religion, that causes it to remain still so much respected even by some enlightened statesmen. When I find such men as Frederick the Great of Prussia, your late President, the illustrious Jefferson, and I may, perhaps, add the late Lord Chesterfield, holding such opinions as regards its utility, I approach this topic with respect, but still with the firm conviction that these distinguished men were mistaken., 1st.?In the first place, an irremediable fault in it is, the great uncertainty as to what it really teaches; for by its endless contradictions, the mind feels greater difficulty in seizing its real tenets than those of mere natural religion for these are written by nature herself in the consciences of all mankind. Hence it is. " that religious wars among chris- tians, and deaths from the inquisition. have cost the lives of 67,000,000 human beings;" whereas " the variety of religions and gods in the heathen world neither produced wars, nor dissentions among the different nations." I admit, that by a wise separation of church and state, you have prevented in a great measure Mosheim's Ecclesiastical History quoted in Trevelyan's pamphlet, (p. 6., ) on the Insanity of Mankind. (Bailliere.)religious wars; but you have not been able to effect impossibilities, and to eradica...