The Congress of 1776, speaking of religion, declared it was the “only solid basis of public liberty and happiness.” General Washington said it was “one of the great pillars of human happiness, and the firmest prop of the duties of men and citizens.” What could we gain by exchanging it for Deism, or Atheism, or Ingersollism? Infidelity proposes to break down the altars of prayer, take away our Bibles and our days of worship, shut up the doors against all our Sunday-schools and turn more than a million of children into the streets, away from sweet song and moralizing influences, and the pure morals of the gospel of Christ. This would bereave the living of his rule of life, and rob the dying of the antidote of death. Shall we “unchain the Tiger”—_unbelief_? What would it bring us in return? Its doctrines are vague speculations, founded on neither data nor evidence; some of its supporters believe in some kind of a God, while some deny every God; some few believe in the immortality of the soul, while a majority, with the French infidels, write over the gates of their cemeteries, “Death is eternal sleep.” In looking over the various infidel productions I think of the old saying, “Be sure you are right, and then go ahead.” There is no certainty in their speculations. They do not agree even in their so-called moral code, nor, as yet, in their doctrinal speculations. Lord Herbert and the Earl of Shaftesbury thought that the light of nature would teach all men, without the aid of revelation, to observe the morality of the Bible. Spinosa and Hobbes, one believing in a God, and the other an Atheist, agreed that there was nothing that was either right or wrong in its own nature; and also agreed “that every man had a right to obtain, either by force or fraud, everything which either his reason or his passions prompted him to believe was useful to himself—duties to the State were his only duties.” Blount, another Freethinker, supposed “that the moral law of nature justified self-murder.” Lord Bolingbroke claimed that it enjoined polygamy; and neither Blount nor Bolingbroke prohibited fornication, or adultery, or incest, except between parents and children.