Democrat And Sentinel

Religious rights of the Hebrews.

Gen. Cass, in presenting a petition to the United States Senate, on Tuesday, made the following just and liberal remarks:

Mr. President, I have been requested by our Hebrew fellow-citizens of this District to present a petition asking for an act of incorporation to enable them to erect a place of worship, and to manage the temporalities connected with it. I understand that the existing laws in this District make provision for those purposes only in relation to Christian denominations. Such a distinction is an act of gross injustice, and, if continued after our attention is directed to it, it would be a disgrace to our jurisprudence. It would ill become us to cast reproach by any act of ours upon the faith of the patriarchs and prophets of Israel, to whose keeping for more than two thousand years were committed the oracles of the true and living God. Considered in a historical aspect only, the rise and progress and fall of the Jewish race constitute the most interesting and remarkable, and, I may add, romantic episode in the whole annals of mankind. The incarnate Saviour himself, in his human capacity, was a Jew, and He came, as he himself declared, not to destroy the first dispensation—that of law—but to fulfill it by the second dispensation—that of mercy. His revelation is freely offered to all the world, whether Jew or Gentile; and it condemns every kind of persecution and intolerance, whether civil or ecclesiastical.

I trust that that fell spirit leading to eternal conflicts between the power to inflict and the power to endure will never take possession of the American heart, nor write its cruel and unchristian decree in the volumes of American legislation. I move the reference of this petition to the Committee on the District of Columbia.