This fact that Protestantism is a theory, a doctrine, or a view of religion, not the objective reality itself, not the recognition and assertion of the rights of God, but a human view or theory of them, proves sufficiently that it is incompatible with the assertion of _religious_ liberty. All it can do is to assert the right or liberty of the state to adopt and ordain any view of religion it may take; of the community to form and enforce its own views, convictions, or opinions; or of the individual to make a religion to suit himself, or to go without any religion at all, as he pleases. In none of these cases is there any religious liberty; and in them all religion is subjected to a purely human authority--the authority of the state, of the community, or of the individual, one as human as another. Protestantism is really in its very nature and essence an earnest and solemn protest against religious liberty, and for it to assert the freedom and independence of religion, or the spiritual order--that is, of religion as law to which all men are bound to conform--would be to commit suicide. Even the supremacy of the spiritual order, which our old Puritans asserted, was only the assertion of the authority of their interpretation of the written word against the divine authority to interpret it claimed by the church, and against the human authority of the civil magistrate claimed by Anglicanism, from which they separated, while it subjected it to the congregation, the brotherhood, or to the ministers and elders, no more spiritual than the civil magistrate himself. In the beginning Protestantism made religion in nearly all Protestant nations a function of the state, as it is still in Great Britain, Prussia, the several Protestant German states, in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Holland, and the Protestant cantons of Switzerland. The progress of events, and the changes of opinion, have produced a revolt among Protestant nations against this order, and Protestants now make, or are struggling to make, it a function of the community or the sect, and the more advanced party of them demand that it be made a function of the individual. This advanced party do not demand the freedom of religion, but the freedom of the individual from all religious restraints, from all obligations of obedience to any religious law, and indeed of any law at all, except the law he imposes on himself. Dr. Bellows, of this city, a champion of this party, proves that it is not the freedom of religion, nor the freedom of the individual to be of any religion he chooses; for he denies that he is free to be a Catholic, though he is free to be any thing else. He tells Catholics they are only tolerated; and threatens them with extermination by the sword, if they dare claim equal rights with Protestants, and insist on having their proportion of the public schools under their own control, or on not being taxed to support schools to which they cannot with a good conscience send their children.