Virginia—Her Past, Present, and Future []

VIRGINIA HER PAST, PRESENT, ETC.
mankind; for a nation of Conservatives is as unnatural, and for any
length of time, quite as impossible as a nation of women. In all
societies in a natural and normal state, men are born in about equal
numbers, as Radicals and Conservatives,just as males and females are
born in equal numbers. Without Radicals, or, to speak more accurately, without Rationalists, society would stagnate and fall back.
Without conservatives, society would be in a state of continual revolution. Laws, customs, political and religious institutions, (for
want of stability,) would afford no security to life, liberty, or property, and anarchy would soon wind up the drama, unless the friendly
sword of despotism intervened to quiet discord and educe order out
of chaos. Faith and reason are equally necessary guides and forces
in the conduct of life, individual, social and political. They are the
anti-nomes, the opposing, yet concurrent forces, that sustain and
keep in action the moral world. There never was a sane man, or
community, or nation, that was not more or less influenced and
directed in their conduct as well by faith as by reason. The war
between faith and reason did not begin with Luther, and the reformation. It is a war as old as mankind, and one essential to the preservation of mankind.
For centuries anterior to the reformation, men reasoned too little,
and believed too much. Hence society stagnated, or progressed too
slowly, and despotism, religious and political, prevailed. Scarcely,
however, had Luther and Calvin upraised the banner of reason, ere
men began to reason for themselves, too much, and to believe too
little. Hence Luther found it necessary to anathematize and excommrunicate more freely and more boldly than the Pope himself, and
Calvin burnt Servitus and several others,-whilst Henry the Eighth,
the most beloved of England's Kings, with singular impartiality, sent
to the stake of martyrdom, on the same hurdle, Catholics and Protestants. Men soon found that Pope Luther, or Pope Calvin, or Pope
Harry, were better than no pope at all. Now every Christian
church has a system of fatith prescribed by its superior authorities,
which its members must believe, or suffer excommunication. Yet
reason is everywhere indulged in bolder speculations than it was by
the early cavaliers of Virginia, or the puritan fathers of New
England.
In New England, however, the settlers having a bran new religion,
the Congregational, just formed, or at least essentially modified, by
the reasoning of their church authorities; men soon began to break
loose from the authority of a parvenue church, to indulge the right
of private judgment, and to reason, far too freely, on all subjects, for
themselves. We have not time to pursue this subject, bnt think
that, generally, reason so far predominates, at the North, over faith,
usage, custom, habit, prescription and authority, that we do no
injustice in styling the people of the North "Rationalists"-rationaists in religion, in politics, in agriculture, in law, in medicine; in
fine, rationalists in all the pursuits and conduct of life. And as old
party issues are dead, and can never be revived, we suggest that the
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