The rejection of the office of chaplain by the State Legislature, and the passage of the “Sunday law,” and other class legislation affecting the religious institutions of the State, meant more than the temporary freak of a few irreligious politicians. It was the expression of a wide-spread and growing sentiment amongst the people, and the first bold demand of a fast-maturing infidelity. The great Napoleon said that “there are certain moral combinations always necessary to produce revolution; and if they do not exist it is impossible to revolutionize a government or interrupt its peaceful administration. Without them a few ambitious leaders, inspired by selfish motives, may struggle in vain for political power.” If civil revolutions attest the wisdom of this remark of the great military chieftain, much more the moral and religious phases which revolutions assume under given conditions. The foreign element, with its rationalism, anti-Sabbatarianism and abused Romanism; the irreligious element, with its Spiritualism, Universalism, Free-lovism and open and disguised infidelity—these furnish to the reflecting “moral combinations” sufficient to produce, or at least to control and direct, the great moral agencies that were so efficient during the civil revolution in burning churches, breaking up religious associations, hunting down and dragging ministers of the gospel “to prison and to death,” and adding to the horrors of civil war, this, that the comforting ministrations of Christianity are proscribed, or altogether prohibited, under the penalty of imprisonment or death, or both imprisonment and death, to the man of God whose enlightened conscience teaches him to fear God rather than man. CHAPTER III. Characteristics of the Population—All Nationalities and all Social Peculiarities Fused into a Common Mass—Missourian—First Settlers of the State—Where From, and their Type of Domestic and Social Life—The “Kansas-Nebraska Bill”—Its Effect upon the Population of Missouri—“Emigration Aid Societies”—Extremes Brought Together in Missouri—Reflex Tides of Population—Rapid Increase—Unique Social Formation—Social Peculiarities Fuse—Religious Characteristics Become more Distinct—Religious Thought and Feeling, Doctrines and Dogmas, Sharply Defined and Fearfully Distinct in Missouri—Sects and their Peculiarities—Sectarian Strife Uncompromising—Why—Religious Controversy—Published Debates—Their Effect—Sectarian Bigotry and Intolerance—Differences, Essential and Non-essential—History Repeating Itself—Persecution the Same in Every Age—Early Martyrs and the Missouri Martyrs—“The Altar, the Wood and the Lamb for a Burnt Offering.”