After making every allowance, indeed, for the popular excitement, which may be of only temporary duration; for the resentful feelings, which may pass away with the occasion which has excited them; still there remains sufficient to justify the worst apprehensions, and to demand the most strenuous exertions at counteraction of the friends of order and religion. It is not merely that there is a want of veneration, love and value for the Church; but a rancorous hatred, spurred on by eager desire of spoliation, is manifested, wherever infidel teachers have made proselytes to their wicked creed. Respect, also, for constituted authorities, is destroyed, by their inculcating the audacious falsehood, that civil government has been framed, to enable the few to rule the many. Value for the laws has been lessened, by their declaring, there is one law for the rich, and another for the poor. And the bonds of affection and kind offices, which united the pastor and the parishioner, the landlord and the tenant, have been almost every where weakened, and in some places broken, by more than the base insinuation, by the assertion, that the forbearance and kindness shown, originate not in friendly regard and Christian charity, but in the ignoble wish of buying golden opinions,—in the pusillanimous desire of propitiating men roused to a sense of their injuries,—of disarming of their angry passions men panting for retaliation and revenge. Thus the force of the public and social obligations of life has been impaired, and those kind ties and sympathies, which bind man to man in their several relations, are converted by the poison of infidel principles, into food for malignant feelings, which inwardly rankle in the heart, and which outwardly evince themselves by discontent, distrust, and dislike; and when the opportunity presents itself, by violence, aggression, and outrage. The effects of such a state of things, if not counteracted, cannot be contemplated, without the most painful apprehension, for, as it has been powerfully expressed, “fatal must be the consequences, if the monstrous fiends of blasphemy and disorganization now going about seeking whom they may devour, and stalking openly through the land, with menace and defiance, be suffered to take undisturbed possession of our peasants and artificers, or of those on whom they immediately depend for their support.” We have already seen the system of extensive combinations carried on in defiance of the laws;—organized bands and tumultuous assemblages of peasantry, extorting money, and enforcing their demands with threats of violence;—wanton destruction of property, in the breaking of machinery, in attacks upon private houses, and in the far more horrible crime of the nocturnal incendiary;—violence and excesses in many towns;—and riot, pillage, and arson, defying for some days, in a great city, municipal authorities and military force.