one or two generations in Geneva, because the convictions of the austere and single-minded reformer were really communicated to a great many minds, and because the very safety of the little city was associated in the feelings of the people with the institutions which had saved it from anarchy and from conquest by its powerful neighbours. In Holland, likewise, in England, and in Scotland, the same cause was temporarily associated with the defence of national liberty. In all these countries, however, the really religiously minded were probably a minority; in England, at least, Puritanism sat upon the nation generally about as easily as a lasso upon a wild horse. In New England, on the contrary, for the first half-century, the majority were decidedly religious, and the system they attempted to establish certainly appears less repulsive than its equivalents in Europe, because Independency aimed at a popular theocracy, whereas the place given to the clergy by Presbyterianism made the Puritanisms of Europe so many attempts to establish aristocratical or caste theocracies. If religious life could have been imposed upon men by authority and external means, we may boldly say the attempt would have succeeded here, where it was made on a virgin soil, under the most favourable circumstances, by some of the best of men, sustained by the highest and purest motives. And, as men are never cured of an error until it has been put to the proof in every possible shape, it is well that the experiment was tried in these conditions. If there is no part of the world at present so anti-theocratic as America, none in which the two societies, civil and religious, have so completely consented to each other's co-existence in friendly distinctness, like a right arm and a left, it is, probably, just because the experience of the contrary principle was carried out more completely here than in any other Protestant country. When John Robinson solemnly warned the exiles, on the eve of their departure from Leyden, to be ready to embrace every truth. God might yet have in reserve for His people, he little thought their descendants would pursue the same noble end-the development of a Christian commonwealth, by means so unlike those they were about to employ.

The disgust with which a population naturally regards religious ideas and practices which have been more or less felt as a yoke, was rendered more intense in England by the feelings of hostility engendered during the long civil wars, and by the bitterness of the conquered royalists. From the accession of Elizabeth onward, a period of more than eighty years, Puritanism had been uninterruptedly gaining strength and

First Protest against Intolerance.

15

winning the affections of the people. But when it was so unfortunate as to accomplish a successful revolution, it thereby attracted the momentary and interested adhesion of those minds, without principles of their own, who are ever ready to flatter the strongest party, exaggerate its tendencies, and crush its rivals, until the time for deserting and turning upon it has come. The consequent reaction of the national feeling was such, that it was not exhausted by all the orgies of the Restoration; and at the final revolution, the liberties for which the Puritans had fought, had to be secured by a very different and a very inferior class of political men. It may be said, without exaggeration, that the popular horror of religious cant, or what passes for such, created during the seventeenth century, is felt to this hour as an obstacle even to true religion, and that without the revival brought about through the grace of God, by Wesley and his fellow-labourers, it would have been almost fatal to true religion amongst us.

This feeling is not to be explained simply by the indignation with which men witness real or supposed hypocrisy, or by the vindictiveness with which they remember former oppression. There is something deeper and more peculiar here. Foolish and minute sumptuary laws were almost universal in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; but those of the Puritans only seem to be generally remembered: regular attendance at divine service was obligatory throughout England, and the penalties for nonconformity rigidly enforced by all the vigilance of the ecclesiastical, and all the power of the civil, authorities; and yet this severity has graven itself on men's minds immeasurably less, in proportion to the suffering inflicted, than that of the Puritans: cavalier Virginia passed acts, in some cases as severe as those of the northern colonies, against Sabbath-breakers, drunkards, fornicators, atheists, blasphemers, and idolaters; but they have been altogether forgotten. It may be said that the faults of the Scottish and English Puritans have been depicted, con amore, by a great master; but Scott was not the author of the feeling of which he availed himself with so much skill, and sometimes with so much injustice towards real historical personages; he was, himself, actuated by the general pre-existing instinct; his readers were prepared for the characters he exhibited.

The fact is that the human mind is impatient of the inconsistencies and self-contradictions cleaving to the best causes and the greatest men, precisely in proportion to the excellency of the cause or the person. Noblesse oblige; there is a perilous responsibility attending the profession of devotion to truth

and goodness. There is that in any lofty conception of individual or collective Christian life, which makes the attempt to impose it by external and arbitrary measures appear meaner and more insupportably odious than any other form of tyranny. The higher the ideal, the more surely we feel, in the depths of our consciences, that it is to be freely embraced, and that it should not be disfigured by anything out of keeping with its greatness and austere beauty. We only smile when Bossuet calls out in an assembly of French prelates, "They who have not faith to fear the invisible blows of your spiritual sword, must needs tremble at the sight of the royal sword. Fear nothing, holy bishops: if men are so rebellious as not to believe your words, which are those of Jesus Christ, rigorous punishments will make them feel their force, and the royal power will never fail you. The admirable spectacle makes one cry aloud with Balaam, Quam pulchra tabernacula tua, Jacob! O, Catholic church, how fair art thou! animated by the Holy Spirit, united by the Holy See; kings keep watch around thee: who shall not respect thee ?" The great Romanist orator only acted after his kind when he thus practised the key-note on which he was soon to celebrate the revocation of the Edict of Nantes; but it is with very different feelings that we see all the surviving reformers of his time congratulating Calvin on the burning of Servetus. What, though the victim himself believed that heretics should be put to death? That one judicial murder inevitably makes a stronger impression than the sacrifice of a whole hecatomb by the bloodstained hands of Roman inquisitors. The severity of the world's judgment is the world's homage to the moral worth of the man, and to the superiority of his religion.

To Roger Williams belongs the honour of having made the first protestation against the principle of religious intolerance -we mean the first practical protestation by a political ruler. Tertullian, and other fathers of the early persecuted church, had proclaimed the dependence of the human conscience upon God alone as an abstract principle. Other fathers had disapproved of the persecution of heretics by Christian emperors. To Michel de l'Hôpital, and a very few other pious Catholics of the sixteenth century, the same praise is due. William the Silent would have anticipated the inauguration of religious liberty by half a century if the assassin's hand had not cut short his days, and, even as it was, Holland had gone farther in this direction at his death than any other country in Europe, except Poland. But unfortunate Poland too soon allowed the Jesuits to remove her crown, and the tole

ration of Holland remained more or less empirical, inconsistent, and vacillating; so that the microscopic little state of Rhode Island was the first political society that rested a practical religious liberty, the most unreserved and steadily maintained, upon a principle clearly understood, the Christian principle of respect for the human conscience as a domain reserved for God alone.

Williams, when a very young man, in humble circumstances, attracted the attention of Sir Edward Coke, who generously sent him to Oxford, and destined him for the bar. He finally took orders, though his fondness for controversy, his abuse of logic, and tendency to push principles to their extreme consequences were probably in some degree due to his legal studies. He went to America as early as 1630, hoping to find upon a soil free from the incumbrance of OldWorld traditions, room for the development of all the liberties on which his heart was already set. But he soon found, says Professor Astié, that the post of honour which truth reserves for the most faithful and devoted of her children, is that of laboriously grubbing up, clearing, ploughing a stony and thorny soil, and throwing in abundant seed season after season, without ever in their own persons reaping the reward of all their toil and sacrifices. Hardly had he landed, when we find him scandalising the good people of Boston, by affirming that they had no right to punish men for Sabbath-breaking, or, in general, for any violation of the first table of the law. It was only of our duties towards our fellows, he insisted, that the magistrate could be cognisant; even if the Church were in danger of falling into heresy or apostasy, the civil authorities had no business to interfere. He also got into trouble by questioning the right of European discoverers to take possession of distant countries, without regard to the prior occupancy of the natives, though this was only a matter of abstract speculation; he did not accuse the colonists of having wronged the Indians, for they had actually, in some cases, paid for the same lands twice over, to different tribes.

After much discussion, during which the innovator was not always moderate and forbearing, but was upon the whole harshly treated, Williams was sentenced to be sent out of the colony within six weeks; this was at the close of 1635. In order not to be sent back to England by force, he left his wife and children in the middle of winter, and took refuge with the Indians of Narragansetts Bay, whom he had already visited as a preacher. Being followed by some friends, who remained faithful to him in adversity, they founded, in July,

1636, the settlement which still bears the name of Providence. In the social contract which they drew up, they promised obedience to all the laws and regulations that should be established for the public weal by the majority of householders, but they did not fail to add, exclusively in civil

matters.

The people of Massachusetts looked upon the new settlement as a focus of all lawlessness and political contagion. They prohibited all commercial intercourse with it, refusing to allow the exiles to purchase at Boston the provisions, the seed, and the instruments of agriculture, which appeared indispensable to the success of their undertaking; nor would they consent to recal the sentence of banishment after Williams had, upon their solicitation, used his influence to hinder the Narragansetts and Mohicans from joining a general confederacy of the red men against the colony, and even induced them to take up arms in its favour.

Williams also used his extraordinary influence over the natives to save the Dutch settlement on the Hudson, the future "empire city," from almost certain destruction. He then went to England, where the great civil war was raging, to procure from the colonial commissioners of the Parliament a charter for his colony; it was dated March 14, 1644. He did not return to America immediately, but stayed in London to publish his key to the Indian tongues, and various controversial writings, especially The Bloody Tenet, in which he anticipated all the arguments that the advocates of religious liberty have since used against State interference with the consciences of men. He owned that the Old Testament gave magistrates the cognisance of sins, as well as offences, but asserted that the miraculous institution and sanction of the theocracy made it an exception in the history of the nations; no government could claim the like prerogatives now, pointing like it to a visible investiture by the Almighty, or in default of this possessing power to discern all truth. The prince, who is also member of a church, is but a passenger on board a ship where his dignity gives him no authority over the sailors. The liberty of the humblest is respected when he wants to choose a partner for this life, how much more should it be so where a heavenly and spiritual union is concerned! He writes with inexorable logic, with all the fire of an ardent mind awoke to the havoc which "The Bloody Tenet" had been working for ages, and with all the indignation of an iron will reacting against the cruel yoke under which he had been bleeding. We have bought the truth dearly, he exclaims, let