How plain and simple! The real object was to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects, and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment. Such was the real object. But the Senator says, if Congress decrees that the Declaration of Independence in its fundamental principles is applicable to a church organization incorporated by State or National authority, we violate this provision of the Constitution! You heard him, Sir; I do no injustice to his argument. Our authority, Judge Story, continues in another place:-- “It was under a solemn consciousness of the dangers from ecclesiastical ambition, the bigotry of spiritual pride, and the intolerance of sects, thus exemplified in our domestic as well as in foreign annals, that it was deemed advisable to exclude from the National Government all power to act upon the subject.”[228] To act upon what? The subject of a religious establishment. No pretence here of denying to Congress the establishment of police regulations, if you please, or the enforcement by law of the fundamental principles of the Declaration of Independence. There is nothing in this text inconsistent with such a law. The Constitution forbids all interference with religion. It does not forbid all effort to carry out the primal principles of republican institutions. Now, Sir, here is no interference with religion. I challenge the Senator to show it. There is simply the assertion of a political rule, or, if you please, a rule of political conduct. Why, Sir, suppose the manners and morals which prevailed among the clergy of Virginia during the early life of Mr. Jefferson, and recently revealed by the vivid pen of one of our best writers, should find a home in the churches of Washington. You have read Mr. Parton’s account in a late number of the “Atlantic Monthly.”[229] Suppose Congress, taking into consideration the peculiar circumstances, should give expression to public sentiment and impose a penalty for such scandalous conduct here under our very eyes; would that be setting up an Established Church? Would that be a violation of the National Constitution, in the provision which the Senator invokes, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”? And yet, in the case I suppose, Congress would enter the churches; it might be only in the District of Columbia; but the case shows how untenable is the position of the Senator, according to which the effort of Congress to preserve churches from the desecration of intemperance would be kindred to setting up an established religion. There is a desecration as bad as intemperance, which I now oppose. I introduce the case of intemperance only as an illustration.