RELIGION AND SABBATH WHALING. 245 



ians, but there is no slave-holding, or Sabbath- 

 breaking Christianity. She alike eschews both, 

 as utterly at war with her doctrines and requisi- 

 tions. They are both alike an incubus upon 

 her, not her offspring. 



At the best, they are but temporary moles 

 and blemishes upon her fair person, which time, 

 together with her own internal purity and energy 

 of constitution, will soon wash off and make 

 to disappear. They are deforming excrescences 

 upon the noble tree of the American Church, 

 which, unless they be soon cut off, may produce 

 the vegetable gangrene or dry rot. But never 

 call them her limbs or leaves, for she indig- 

 nantly denies the parentage, and asserts that they 

 have fastened on her like leeches, but are not 

 of her ; and she protests that it would be as unfair 

 to call the monarch oak by the name of some 

 parasitical vine that now and then coils over it, 

 as to give herself epithets from the heresies and 

 misdeeds that have so struck their roots into 

 her bark as to be nourished by her juices. 



Rather let it be our business to pull off the 

 unnatural growth, or purge it with the physic 



