84 ORIENTATION,
of Christianity. While Jews and infidels are not excluded from the enjoyment of any civil or political right on account of their religion or irreligion, they cannot alter the essentially Christian character of the sentiments, habits and institutions of the nation.
There are three important institutions in which church and state touch each other even in the United States, and where a collision of interests may take place: education in the public schools, marriage, and Sunday as a day of civil and sacred rest. The Roman Catholics are, opposed to public schools unless they can teach in them their religion which allows no compromise with any other; the Mormons are opposed to monogamy, which is the law of the land and the basis of the Christian family; the Jews may demand the protection of their Sabbath on Saturday, while infidels want no Sabbath at all except perhaps for amusement and dissipation. But all these questions admit of a peaceful set- ᾿ tlement and equitable adjustment, without a relapse into the barbarous measures of persecution.
The law of the United States is supreme in the Territories and the District of Columbia, but does ποὺ forbid any of the States to establish a particular church, or to continue a previous establishment. The Colonies began with the European system of statechurchism, only in a milder form, and varying according to the preferences of the first settlers. In the New England Colonies— except Rhode Island founded by the Baptist Roger Williams —orthodox Congregationalism was the established church which all citizens were required to support ; in Virginia and the Southern States, as also in New York, the Episcopal Church was legally established and supported by the government.’ Even those
1A Presbyterian minister, Francis Makemie, was arrested on a warrant of the Episcopal Governor Cornby of New York, Jan. 20, 1707, for preaching in a private house, without permission, and although he was ably defended in a public trial and acquitted on the ground that he had been licensed to preach under the Act of Toleration, he had to pay the costs of the prosecution as well as the defence to the large amount of £83 7s. 6d. See Briggs, American Presbyterianism, New York, 1885, pp, 152-154.
§ 12. RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE AND LIBERTY. 85
Colonies which were professedly founded on the basis of religious toleration, as Maryland and Pennsylvania, enacted afterwards disabling clauses against Roman Catholics, Unitarians, Jews and infidels. In Pennsylvania, the Quaker Colony of William Penn, no one could hold office, from 1693 to 1775, without subscribing a solemn declaration of belief in the orthodox doctrine of the Holy Trinity and condemning the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation and the mass as idolatrous.’
The great revolution of legislation began in the Colony of Virginia in 1776, when Episcopacy was disestablished, and all other churches freed from their disabilities.2 The change was brought about by the combined efforts of Thomas Jefferson (the leading statesman of Virginia, and a firm believer in absolute religious freedom on the ground of philosophic neutrality), and of all dissenting denominations, especially the Presbyterians, Baptists and Quakers. The other Colonies or States gradually followed the example, and now there is no State in which religious freedom is not fully recognized and protected.
The example of the United States exerts a silent, but steady and mighty influence upon Europe in raising the idea of mere toleration to the higher plane of freedom, in emancipating religion from the control of civil government, and in proving the advan-
1Comp. Dr. Charles J. Stillé, Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. A paper read before the Hist. Soc. of Penna., Nov. 9, 1885. Philada., 1886. 58 pp. “Tt is hard to believe,” he says, p. 57, “that a man like Franklin, for instance, would at any time have approved of religious tests for office ; yet Franklin’s name is attached over and over again in the Qualification Books to the Declaration of Faith, which he was forced to make when he entered upon the duties of the various offices which he held. He must have been literally forced to take such a test; for we find him on the first opportunity, when the people of this commonwealth determined to declare their independence alike of the Penn family and of the Crown of Great Britain, raising his voice against the imposition of such tests as had been taken during the Provincial period. Franklin was the president and the ruling spirit of the convention which framed the State Constitution of 1776, and to his influence has generally been ascribed the very mild form of test which by that instrument was substituted for the old one.”
2 The act of 1776 was completed by an act of October, 1785. See Hening, Collection of the Laws of Virginia, vol. XII. 84.