If, therefore, there is no transgression of constitutional law in carrying the United States Mail on the first day, then there is none in a private citizen following his otherwise lawful and peaceable occupation on the same day. In some quarters, during the last year, our motives and designs were grossly misrepresented by prejudiced persons, in our legislatures and elsewhere. We were represented as "wishing the legislature to change the Sabbath from the first to the seventh day of the week;" and were accused of "covertly wishing to compel our fellow-citizens to keep our Sabbath day." No insinuation could be more grossly deceptive--no accusation more flagitiously unjust to us as a people. We declare unequivocally, that we do not desire any such thing. We believe that keeping the Sabbath day is purely a religious duty. All we ask is, that our State Legislatures leave the matter where the Constitution of the United States and the laws of the General Government have placed it. They have no more right to determine this religious duty, than they have to determine the rites of Christian worship. We believe our fellow-citizens ought to be protected in the peaceable observation of their day of religious rest, as in the observance of every other religious institution, except where such observance is made a sanctuary for crime. We ask the same protection for ourselves on the seventh day of the week, and nothing more. If the Constitution may be infringed upon to put down the observers of the seventh day, no one can say how long it will be before other minor denominations may be put down too. Already attempts are making to exact a confession of faith, unknown to the Constitution, as a qualification for a legal oath. If the religious sanctification of the first day of the week may be enforced by statutory requirements, so may the forms and hours of worship. He who says, that there is no danger of the latter being enforced, while statutory regulations violate two of the most sacred provisions of the National Constitution, knows but little of the history of mankind, or pays but little attention to the tendencies of human nature. A single standing violation of the Constitution is an example and an authority for others to follow. One religious observance established by law, is the admission of the main principle of national hierarchy, and will come in time to be referred to as authority for similar infractions of the Constitution. The laws for the observance of the first day are in fact a union of Church and State. It is not pretended that they are designed to subserve directly a political or civil object. It is altogether a religious object which they subserve. It becomes every friend of equal rights, as he loves the Constitution of his country, to oppose these infractions of its just principles, until equal liberty is secured to all citizens by statutory provisions, as by the fundamental laws of the nation.