The vigorous exertions of agriculture often extend far beyond the hoc, the plough, and the harrow. The Ame rican improver is frequently required to rear his own buildings for man and beast. He must conquer the stur dy forest and the deep morass—laborious though gainful preparations for productive cultivation. In many of the states, the judicious agriculturist is always an improver. The most ancient families, and those of the first intelli gence, fortune and standing, as well as foreign emigrants of the latest years, are engaged in the settlement and improvement of contiguous or adjacent forests. Where lately every production of nature flourished in wildness, there now the garden, the meadow, and the harvest smile.
Useful and necessary rural improvements offer to all the Americans a prudent and gainful employment for surplus income, producing, often, an habitual course of moralizing industry and economy.
Anxious parents, in country life, see before them their children's prospects of rising in the world, where infant settlements, increasing with our hottest labour, pervade the land. The existing generations have carved, as it were, numerous counties and several states out of the howling wilderness. Titus are the Americans, under the favour of heaven, the energetic temporal creators of their own cities, towns and villages, their own goodly country and all the copious blessings it contains.
As the American people have, in truth, carved their productive country out of the stupendous Ibrest, which originally covered their dominions, so have they made, out of the systems of policy, morals, and religion of the world, their own plan of justice and civilization in rela tion to the Indian aborigines—their own penal code for unhappy criminals—a complete extinction of the com merce in men—their own constitutions of social freedom and of federative union, and their ONS 11 blessed establish ment of religious liberty4 din enlightened and cordial attachment to religious liberty is one of the actual characteristics of the United Americans. Respect for the rights of conscience is, in no cou»try, so general, so conspicuous, or so well se cured by civil institutions, and by the religious dis cipline, practice and tenets of the various churches. We see here the Congregational and the Presbyterian Calvinists worshipping the deity in each other's houses. So of the German Lutheran and German reformed Calvinists. So of the English and Swedish and Ger man Lutheran congregations. Some religious houses are used by all. Marriages are performed by the minis ters and magistrates of each of the various churches for the members of others.
The ministers of these societies have officiated at the interment of deceased persons of each other's churches. Families of all religious societies intermarry. The con stitution of the United States prohibits, in express and peremptory terms, the requiring a religious test, in any case, by the statutes of the national legislature. The con stitutions of a very large proportion of the several states contain similar or equivalent securities for the rights of conscience. !none oldie states the members °Rile clergy of every religious society may be considered as dis franchised (as all but the bishops are in a degree in England) by an exclusion from every civil office. Funds, which were bestowed by legislatures of past times upon favoured churches, have been returned to the treasuries of certain states for public uses, or for the churches at large, or for the instruction of youth. A bishop or dained by the Scotch Episcopacy, three by the Pope, and some by those of England are found here ; but they have no American revenues, palaces, or power, except in their proper ministry, in their own religious society. There are no other dignitaries of any church : no tythes : no incorporation beyond a rectory, which includes an independent lay vestry and excludes the assistant ministers : no convocation : no other than a mere as sociated convention or synod or yearly meeting, with out any foundation at law. These bodies are kindly and equally permitted to enjoy an undisturbed exis tence, by the just and free spirit of our civil institu tions, under the exclusive government of divine Pro vidence. Religion in North America is a Theocracy. This is a blessed truth, and is not either an unsubtantial refinement or fanciful suggestion of enthusiasm. There is here no war among the different societies or church es. None has the sword of the state to raise against a sister church. The peaceful churches are therefore as free, and as strong, as the churches, which admit defensive resistance. In this powerful influence, that of religious liberty, is to be found the precious secret, which amalgamates the minds of the serious native and naturalized citizens. The republic of oppressed churches from Europe, equally protected but unestablished in America, the influence of a very early, but inconsistent law of Maryland, the pious institutions of Roger Wil liams in Rhode Island, the great wisdom and goodness of William Penn, and the peaceful firmness and per severance of the religious Society of the Friends have worked for us, under the favour of divine Providence, this precious and transcendent blessing.