I call it ATHEISM BY ESTABLISHMENT, when any state, as such, shall not
acknowledge the existence of God as a moral governor of the world; when
it shall offer to him no religious or moral worship;--when it shall
abolish the Christian religion by a regular decree;--when it shall
persecute with a cold, unrelenting, steady cruelty, by every mode of
confiscation, imprisonment, exile, and death, all its ministers;--when
it shall generally shut up or pull down churches; when the few buildings
which remain of this kind shall be opened only for the purpose of
making a profane apotheosis of monsters, whose vices and crimes have
no parallel amongst men, and whom all other men consider as objects of
general detestation, and the severest animadversion of law. When, in
the place of that religion of social benevolence, and of individual
self-denial, in mockery of all religion, they institute impious,
blasphemous, indecent theatric rites, in honour of their vitiated,
perverted reason, and erect altars to the personification of their own
corrupted and bloody republic;--when schools and seminaries are founded
at the public expense to poison mankind, from generation to generation,
with the horrible maxims of this impiety;--when wearied out with
incessant martyrdom, and the cries of a people hungering and thirsting
for religion, they permit it only as a tolerated evil--I call this
ATHEISM BY ESTABLISHMENT.