80 ORIENTATION.
incompetent to continue it. Puritanism had not won the heart of England, but prepared its own tomb by its excesses and blunders. Royalty and Episcopacy, which struck their roots deep in the past, were restored with the powerful aid of the Presbyterians. And now followed a reaction in favor of political and ecclesiastical despotism, and public and private immorality, which for a time ruined all the good which Puritanism had done. Charles II., who “never said a foolish thing and never did a wise one,” broke his solemn pledges and took the lead in intolerance and licentiousness. The Act of Uniformity was re-enacted May 19, 1662, and went into operation on St. Bartholomew’s Day, August 24, 1662, made hideous by the St. Bartholomew Massacre, nearly a hundred years before. ‘And now came in,” says Baxter, one of the most moderate as well as most learned and pious of the Nonconformists, “ the great inundation of calamities, which in many streams overwhelmed thousands of godly Christians, together with their pastors.” All Puritan ministers were expelled from their livings and exposed to starvation, their assemblies forbidden, and absolute obedience to the king and conformity to episcopacy were enforced, even in Scotland. The faithful Presbyterians in that country (the Covenanters) were subjected by the royal dragonnades to all manner of indignities and atrocities. “They were hunted”—says an English historian !—“ like criminals over the mountains ; their ears were torn from their roots; they were branded with hot irons; their fingers were wrenched asunder by the thumbkins ; the bones of their legs were shattered in the boots; women were scourged publicly through the streets; multitudes were transported to the Barbadoes ; an infuriated soldiery was let loose upon them, and encouraged to exercise all their ingenuity in torturing them.” The period of the Restoration is, perhaps, the most immoral and disgraceful in English history. But it led at last to the final overthrow of the treacherous and semi-popish dynasty of the Stuarts, and inaugurated a new era in the history of religious
1 Lecky, History of Rationalism in Europe, 11., 48 (N. Y. ed.).
§ 12. RELIGIOUS. INTOLERANCE AND LIBERTY. 81
liberty. Puritanism was not dead, but produced some of its best and most lasting works—Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress—in this period of its deepest humiliation and suffering.
8. The act of ToLERATION under the reign of William and Mary, 1689, made an end to violent persecutions in England. _ And yet it is far from what we now understand by religious liberty. Toleration is negative, liberty positive; toleration is a favor, liberty a right; toleration may be withdrawn by the power which grants it, liberty is as inalienable as conscience itself; toleration is extended to what cannot be helped and what may be in itself objectionable, liberty is a priceless gift of the Creator.
The Toleration of 1689 was an accommodation to a limited number of Dissenters—Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists and Quakers, who were allowed liberty of separate organization and public worship on condition of subscribing thirty-six out of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. Roman Catholics and Unitarians were excluded, and did not acquire toleration in England till the nineteenth century, the former by the Act of Emancipation passed April 13, 1829. Even now the Dissenters in England labor under minor disabilities and social disadvantages, which will continue as long as the government patronizes an established church. They have to support the establishment, in addition to their own denomination. Practically, however, there is more religious liberty in England than anywhere on the Continent, and as much as in the United States.
9. The last and most important step in the progress of religious liberty was taken by the UniTED SraTEs of America in the provision of the Federal Constitution of 1787, which excludes all religious tests from the qualifications to any office or public trust. The first amendment to the Constitution (1789) enacts that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” }
1 Ph. Schaff, Church and State in the United States, New York, 1888.