GENERAL REMARKS ON THE PROGRESS OF RELIGIOUS LIBERTY.
The question in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was about toleration and persecution. But religious freedom requires much more, and is now regarded as one of the fundamental and most precious rights of men, which must be sacredly protected in its public exercise by the civil government, within the limits of order, peace, and public morals. This liberty is the final result and gain of ages of intolerance and persecution.
The history of religious persecution is the darkest chapter in Church history--we may call it the devil's chapter--and the darkest part in it is the persecution of Christians by Christians. It is, however, relieved by the counter-manifestation of the heroic virtues of Christian martyrdom and the slow but steady progress of liberty through streams of martyr blood.
All Christian Churches, except a few denominations of recent date which never had a chance, have more or less persecuted when in power, and must plead guilty. The difference is only one of degree. The Episcopalians were less intolerant than the Roman Catholics, the Presbyterians less intolerant than the Episcopalians, the Independents less intolerant (in theory) than the Presbyterians. But they were all intolerant. Even the Independents of Old England, with the great Cromwell and the great Milton as their leaders, excluded Romanists, Prelatists (i.e., Episcopalians), and Unitarians from their programme of toleration, [1546] and, strange to say, when in power in New England, they expelled Baptists and hanged Quakers on the virgin soil of Massachusetts before and after the Westminster Assembly. On the other hand, however, there is not a Christian Church or sect that has not complained of intolerance and injustice under persecution, and that has not furnished some bold advocates of toleration and freedom, from Tertullian and Lactantius down to Roger Williams and William Penn. This is the redeeming feature in this fearful picture, and must not be overlooked in making up a just estimate.
It is therefore the greatest possible injustice to charge the persecutions to Christianity, which breathes the very opposite spirit of forbearance, forgiveness, love, and liberality; which teaches us to suffer wrong rather than to inflict wrong; and which, by restoring the divine image in man, and lifting him up to the sphere of spiritual freedom, is really the pure source of all that is truly valuable in our modern ideas of civil and religious liberty. Whatever may be said of the severity of the Mosaic legislation, which assumes the union of the civil and ecclesiastical power, Christ and the Apostles, both by precept and example, strictly prohibit the use of carnal means for the promotion of the kingdom of heaven, which is spiritual in its origin, character, and aim. The reminiscence of this spirit lingered in the Church through the darkest ages in the maxim Ecclesia non sitit sanguinem.
It is also wrong to derive intolerance from the strength and intensity of religious conviction--although this undoubtedly may come in as an additional stimulus--and to trace toleration to skepticism and unbelief. [1547] For who had stronger convictions than St. Paul? His Jewish conviction or pharisaical fanaticism made him a bitter persecutor, but his Christian conviction inspired his seraphic description of love (1 Cor. xiii.) and strengthened him for martyrdom. On the other hand, the Deist philosopher, Hobbes, by giving the civil power an absolute right to determine the religion of a nation, taught the extreme doctrine of persecution; and the reign of terror in France proves that infidelity may be as fanatical and intolerant as the strongest faith, and may instigate the most horrible of persecutions.
Intolerance is rooted in the selfishness and ambition of human nature and in the spirit of sectarian exclusiveness, which assumes that we and the sect to which we belong have the monopoly of truth and orthodoxy, and that all who dissent from us must be in error. Persecution follows as a legitimate consequence of this selfishness and bigotry wherever the intolerant party has the power to persecute.
The Roman Church, wherever she controls the civil government, can not consistently tolerate, much less legally recognize, any form of worship besides her own, because she identifies herself with the infallible Church of Christ, out of which there is no salvation, and regards all who dissent from her as damnable schismatics and heretics. [1548] Protestants, who began with the assertion of private judgment against the authority of Rome, and complained bitterly of her persecuting spirit, are inconsistent and more inexcusable if they refuse the same right to others and persecute them for its exercise. For a long time, however, Protestantism clung to the traditional idea of uniformity in religion, and this was the source of untold suffering, especially in England, until it became manifest beyond a doubt that doctrinal and ceremonial uniformity was an impossibility in a nation of intelligent freemen. The Toleration Act of May 24, 1689, for the relief of Dissenters, marks the transition. Since that time religious persecution by the civil power has ceased in the Anglo-Saxon race, and the principle of religious liberty has gradually become a settled conviction of the most advanced sections of the Christian world.
For this change of public sentiment the chief merit is due to the English Non-conformists, who in the school of persecution became advocates of toleration, especially to the Baptists and Quakers, who made religious liberty (within the limits of the golden rule) an article of their creed, so that they could not consistently persecute even if they should ever have a chance to do so. [1549] It was next promoted by the eloquent advocacy of toleration in the writings of Chillingworth, [1550] Jeremy Taylor, [1551] and other Anglican divines of the latitudinarian school; further, by the mingling of creeds and sects in the same country where persecution failed of its aim; and, lastly, by the skeptical philosophy and the religious indifferentism of the eighteenth century, which, however, has repeatedly shown itself most intolerant of all forms of positive belief, and can therefore be no more trusted than the bigotry of superstition. Religious freedom is best guaranteed by an enlightened Christian civilization, a liberal culture, a large-hearted Christian charity, a comprehensive view of truth, a free social intercourse of various denominations, and a wise separation of civil and ecclesiastical government.
During the last stages of the age of persecution Providence began to prepare in the colonies of North America the widest field and the proper social basis for the full exercise of religious liberty and equality by bringing together under one government the persecuted of all nations and sects, so that the enjoyment of the liberty of each depends upon and is guaranteed by the recognition and protection of the liberty of all the rest.
[1516] In the debate on predestination Dr. Reynolds wisely said, 'Let us not put disputes and scholastic things into a confession of faith.'--Minutes, p. 151.
[1517] Principal Baillie wrote (Jan. 26, 1647, Letters, Vol. III. p. 2): 'The Confession is much cried up by all, even many of our greatest opposites, as the best confession yet extant.' The moderate and judicious Richard Baxter esteemed the Westminster Confession and Catechisms the best books in his library next to the Bible, and says (in his Confession, ch. i. § 5): 'I have perused oft the Confession of the Assembly, and verily judge it the most excellent, for fullness and exactness, that I have ever read from any Church; and though the truths therein, being of several degrees of evidence and necessity, I do not hold them with equal clearness, confidence, or certainty; and though some few points in it are beyond my reach, yet I have observed nothing in it contrary to my judgment, if I may be allowed those expositions following.' The saintly Archbishop Leighton, though he left the Church for which his father had suffered such cruelties from Laud, taught the doctrine of the Confession to the end of his life.
[1518] J. B. Marsden (The History of the Later Puritans, 1852, pp. 80, 81), while judging severely of the Assembly on account of its treatment of Episcopacy, thinks the Westminster Confession inferior to none of the Protestant Confessions except in originality, and adds: 'It does not, however, detract from the real merit of these later divines, that they availed themselves of the labors of the Reformation; or that Bullinger and Calvin, especially the latter, should have left them little to accomplish, except in the way of arrangement and compression. The Westminster Confession should be read by those who can not encounter the more ponderous volumes of the great masters from which it is derived. It is in many respects an admirable summary of Christian faith and practice. None can lay it down with a mean opinion of the Westminster divines. The style is pure and good, the proofs are selected with admirable skill, the arguments are always clear, the subjects well distributed, and sufficiently comprehensive to form at least the outline of a perfect system of divinity.' It is but just to add that Marsden goes on to censure what he calls its 'rigid ultra-Calvinism, which has always repelled the great majority of English Christians.' Dean Stanley, who has no theological sympathy with the Westminster Confession, says that of all Protestant Confessions 'it far more nearly approaches the full proportions of a theological treatise, and exhibits far more depth of theological insight, than any other,' He adds, however, that 'it reflects also far more than any other the minute hair-splitting and straw-dividing distinctions which had reached their height in the Puritanical theology of that age, and which in sermons ran into the sixteenthly, seventeenthly sections that so exercised the soul of Dugald Dalgetty as he waited for the conclusion of the discourse in the chapel of Inverary Castle. It accordingly furnished the food for which the somewhat hard and logical intellect of Scotland had a special appetite' (Lectures on the History of the Church of Scotland, delivered in 1872, Am. ed. p. 88). In another place Stanley calls the Westminster formulary 'that famous Confession of Faith which, alone within these islands, was imposed by law on the whole kingdom; and which, alone of all Protestant Confessions, still, in spite of its sternness and narrowness, retains a hold on the minds of its adherents, to which its fervor and its logical coherence in some measure entitle it' (Memorials of Westminster Abbey, p. 513).
[1519] Dr. Currey, for many years editor of the 'Methodist Advocate,' of New York, in an editorial on Creeds (Aug. 6, 1874), calls 'the Westminster Confession of Faith the ablest, clearest, and most comprehensive system of Christian doctrine ever framed. That venerable instrument purposely embodies in its unity the dogma of absolute predestination, which necessarily becomes the corner-stone of the edifice, so giving it shape and character. But, despite that capital fault, it is not only a wonderful monument of the intellectual greatness of its framers, but a comprehensive embodiment of nearly all the precious truths of the gospel. If set forth without ecclesiastical authority, for the edification of believers, it would, despite its faults, be a work of inestimable worth; but enforced by such authority, and imposed upon men's consciences, it is a yoke and a chain and a cage of iron. And yet this is the accepted formula of faith of nearly all the Calvinistic Churches of America. Even the Congregationalists in National Council, at Plymouth Rock, only a few years ago, reaffirmed their acceptance of it.'
[1520] Dr. Wallis, the mathematician, who is said to be the chief author of the sharp definitions of the Shorter Catechism (see p. 786), wrote towards the close of the seventeenth century a pamphlet in defense of the doctrine of the Trinity against rising Unitarianism, where he compares the Almighty to a cube with its length, breadth, and height infinitely extended, longum, latum, profundum, which are the equal sides of one substance, and fairly resemble the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. He finds nothing mysterious in this doctrine. 'It is,' he says, 'but this, that there be three somewhats, which are but one God, and these somewhats are called Persons.' Quoted by Stoughton, The Church of the Revolution, p. 213.