I call it Atheism by Establishment, when any state, as such, shall not acknowledge the existence of God as a moral governor of the world,—­when it shall offer to Him no religious or moral worship,—­when it shall abolish the Christian religion by a regular decree,—­when it shall persecute, with a cold, unrelenting, steady cruelty, by every mode of confiscation, imprisonment, exile, and death, all its ministers,—­when it shall generally shut up or pull down churches,—­when the few buildings which remain of this kind shall be opened only for the purpose of making a profane apotheosis of monsters whose vices and crimes have no parallel amongst men, and whom all other men consider as objects of general detestation and the severest animadversion of law.  When, in the place of that religion of social benevolence and of individual self-denial, in mockery of all religion, they institute impious, blasphemous, indecent theatric rites, in honor of their vitiated, perverted reason, and erect altars to the personification of their own corrupted and bloody republic,—­when schools and seminaries are founded at public expense to poison mankind, from generation to generation, with the horrible maxims of this impiety,—­when, wearied out with incessant martyrdom, and the cries of a people hungering and thirsting for religion, they permit it only as a tolerated evil,—­I call this Atheism by Establishment.

When to these establishments of Regicide, of Jacobinism, and of Atheism, you add the correspondent system of manners, no doubt can be left on the mind of a thinking man concerning their determined hostility to the human race.  Manners are of more importance than laws.  Upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend.  The law touches us but here and there, and now and then.  Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in.  They give their whole form and color to our lives.  According to their quality, they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them.  Of this the new French legislators were aware; therefore, with the same method, and under the same authority, they settled a system of manners, the most licentious, prostitute, and abandoned that ever has been known, and at the same time the most coarse, rude, savage, and ferocious.  Nothing in the Revolution, no, not to a phrase or a gesture, not to the fashion of a hat or a shoe, was left to accident.  All has been the result of design; all has been matter of institution.  No mechanical means could be devised in favor of this incredible system of wickedness and vice, that has not been employed.  The noblest passions, the love of glory, the love of country, have been debauched into means of its preservation and its propagation.  All sorts of shows and exhibitions, calculated to inflame and vitiate the imagination and pervert the moral sense,