We wish to you first, and through you, to the world, to express our respect for those heroic clergymen who dared to offer public prayers to Almighty God for the success of your arms.  We have not forgotten the manner in which Austria attempted to dragoon their tongues into silence, and their souls into abject submission.  Nor can we believe that a country with such pastors—­that a country whose religious interests are confided to men ready to pray against the Despot, will be suffered by our heavenly Father to remain trodden down, and to have her name blotted out of the history of nations.  If in the great battle of freedom, the heart of the minister of religion at the Altar, beats in sympathy with the heart of the minister at the Council Board, and the soldier in the battle-field, there is then a union of the moral, intellectual, and physical forces of a nation, which we have been taught to believe would generally and ultimately be victorious.

We frankly confess to you that our hope that Hungary is not to share the fate of unhappy Poland, is grounded first on the large element of a Protestant ministry she embraces, and secondly on the advance which the nations are making in a true understanding of the principles of republican freedom.  We believe the cause of Hungary to be just.  Against the usurpations of Kings and perjured Princes—­against the interference of foreign powers to assist in treading on the sparks of liberty anywhere on the earth, and especially in such a land as yours, we claim the privilege at the fit time of entering our protest and expressing toward such acts our deepest abhorrence.  And while we desire most earnestly the advent of universal peace, and rejoice that the power of moral principles is increasing in the world, and anticipate the day when the nations shall learn war no more, yet we are fully convinced, both from the Holy Scriptures and the history of the past, that under the overruling providence of God wars occasioned by the oppression, the ambition, and the covetousness of men, are often the means of breaking up the stagnant waters of superstition and irreligion, and securing to the truth a position from which it may most successfully send abroad its light, and mould the heart of a nation to religion and peace. Despotism is in our view a perpetual war of a few upon the many; and we must unlearn some of the earliest lessons that our mothers taught us and our fathers illustrated in their lives, before we can cease to sympathize with the assertors of their rights against the force or the fraud of their fellow-men.  And since the sad issue of revolution after revolution in infidel France, there are not a few of us, who have indulged the hope (especially since your visit to our shores), that in central Europe, in your native land, among an undebauched and a Bible-reading people, a government might arise that would accord freedom of conscience to all, and shine as a light of virtuous republicanism upon the darkness around.