One finds this tendency where it is least expected: there is a philosophical party in politics, a very small party it may be, but an actual one. They aim to get at everlasting ideas and universal laws, not made by man, but by God, and for man, who only finds them; and from them they aim to deduce all particular enactments, so that each statute in the code shall represent a fact in the universe; a point of thought in God; so, indeed, that legislation shall be divine in the same sense that a true system of astronomy is divine--or the Christian religion--the law corresponding to a fact. Men of this party, in New England, have more ideas than precedents, are spontaneous more than logical; have intuitions, rather than intellectual convictions, arrived at by the process of reasoning. They think it is not philosophical to take a young scoundrel and shut him up with a party of old ones, for his amendment; not philosophical to leave children with no culture, intellectual, moral, or religious, exposed to the temptations of a high and corrupt civilization, and then, when they go astray--as such barbarians needs must, in such temptations--to hang them by the neck for the example's sake. They doubt if war is a more philosophical mode of getting justice between two nations, than blows to settle a quarrel between two men. In either case, they do not see how it follows, that he who can strike the hardest blow is always in the right. In short, they think that judicial murder, which is hanging, and national murder, which is war, are not more philosophical than homicide, which one man commits on his own private account. Theological sects are always the last to feel any popular movement. Yet all of them, from the Episcopalians to the Quakers, have each a philosophical party, which bids fair to outgrow the party which rests on precedent and usage, to overshadow and destroy it. The Catholic church itself, though far astern of all the sects, in regard to the great movements of the age, shares this spirit, and abroad, if not here, is wellnigh rent asunder by the potent medicine which this new Daniel of philosophy has put into its mouth. Everywhere in the American churches there are signs of a tendency to drop all that rests merely on tradition and hearsay, to cling only to such facts as bide the test of critical search, and such doctrines as can be verified in human consciousness here and to-day. Doctors of divinity destroy the faith they once preached.