father rather send his child where he could get instruction under any form of the Christian religion, than where he could get none at all?  There are many instances of institutions, professing one leading creed, educating youths of different sects.  The Baptist college in Rhode Island receives and educates youths of all religious sects and all beliefs.  The colleges all over New England differ in certain minor points of belief, and yet that is held to be no ground for excluding youth with other forms of belief, and other religious views and sentiments.

But this objection to the multitude and differences of sects is but the old story, the old infidel argument.  It is notorious that there are certain great religious truths which are admitted and believed by all Christians.  All believe in the existence of a God.  All believe in the immortality of the soul.  All believe in the responsibility, in another world, for our conduct in this.  All believe in the divine authority of the New Testament.  Dr. Paley says that a single word from the New Testament shuts up the mouth of human questioning, and excludes all human reasoning.  And cannot all these great truths be taught to children without their minds being perplexed with clashing doctrines and sectarian controversies?  Most certainly they can.

And, to compare secular with religious matters, what would become of the organization of society, what would become of man as a social being, in connection with the social system, if we applied this mode of reasoning to him in his social relations?  We have a constitutional government, about the powers, and limitations, and uses of which there is a vast amount of differences of belief.  Your honors have a body of laws, now before you, in relation to which differences of opinion, almost innumerable, are daily spread before the courts; in all these we see clashing doctrines and opinions advanced daily, to as great an extent as in the religious world.

Apply the reasoning advanced by Mr. Girard to human institutions, and you will tear them all up by the root; as you would inevitably tear all divine institutions up by the root, if such reasoning is to prevail.  At the meeting of the first Congress there was a doubt in the minds of many of the propriety of opening the session with prayer; and the reason assigned was, as here, the great diversity of opinion and religious belief.  At length Mr. Samuel Adams, with his gray hairs hanging about his shoulders, and with an impressive venerableness now seldom to be met with, (I suppose owing to the difference of habits,) rose in that assembly, and, with the air of a perfect Puritan, said that it did not become men, professing to be Christian men, who had come together for solemn deliberation in the hour of their extremity, to say that there was so wide a difference in their religious belief, that they could not, as one man, bow the knee in prayer to the Almighty, whose advice and assistance they hoped to