The United States have not only proclaimed and loyally carried out the glorious principle of religious liberty, but have adopted as a corollary another principle, much more contested among us, but which I believe destined also to make the tout of the world:  the principle of separation of Church and State.  That believers should support their own worship, that religious and political questions should never be blended, that the two provinces should remain distinct, is a simple idea which seems most strange to us to-day.  It will make its way like all other true ideas, which begin as paradoxes and end by becoming axioms.  Meanwhile, the American Confederation enjoys an advantage which more than one European government, I suspect, would at some moments purchase at a high price:  it has not to trouble itself about religious interests, either in its action without or its administration within.  If there are conflicts everywhere in the spiritual order, it leaves them to struggle and become resolved in the spiritual order, without needing to trouble itself in the matter.  Hence arises for the State a freedom of bearing, a simplicity of conduct, which we, who have to steer adroitly through so many dangers, can hardly comprehend.  The American government is sure of never offending any church—­it knows none; it does not interfere either to combat or to aid them; it has renounced, once for all, intervention, in the domain of conscience.

The result, doubtless, is, that this domain is not so well ordered as in Europe; the administrative ecclesiastical state has by no means submitted to such regulation.  Is that to say that this inconvenience (if it be one) is not largely compensated for by its advantages?  Is it nothing to suppress inheritance in religious matters, and to force each soul to question itself as to what it believes?  In the United States, adhesion to a church is an individual, spontaneous act, resulting from a voluntary determination.  This is so true that four-fifths of the inhabitants of the country do not bear, the title of church members.  Although attending worship, although manifesting an interest and zeal in the subject to which we are little accustomed, although assiduous church-goers, and liberal givers, they have not yet felt within themselves a conviction strong and clear enough to make a public profession of faith.  Think what we may of such a system, we must avow, at least, that it implies a profound respect for sacred things; nothing can less resemble that indolent and formal assent which we give, in conformity with custom, and without binding ourselves, in earnest, to the religion that prevails among us.