eral Constitution and in the territory over which the Federal Government has local jurisdiction. Some of the States maintained a state church and kept religious laws upon their statute books long after the Constitution forbade to the Federal Government such establishment or legal interference with the rights of the individual conscience and a man's duty toward God. Thomas Jefferson drafted the statute for religious freedom in Virginia the same year that he wrote the Declaration of Independence for all

the States. But his bill for religious freedom, which he submitted to the legislature of Virginia, did not become a law until 1785. The preamble to this famous 'Act for Establishing Religious Freedom" reads as follows:

"Well aware that Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burdens, or by civil inca

tyrannical; that even the foreing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious liberty of giving his contributions to the parpersuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable ticular pastor whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness, and is withdrawing from the ministry those temporal rewards, which proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct, are an additional incitement to

pacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy Author of our religion, who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his almighty power to do; that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world, and through all time; that to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagations of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and

earnest and unremitting labors for the instruction of mankind; that our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, more than our opinions in physics or geometry: that, therefore, the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the publie confidence by laying upon him an ineapacity of being called to the offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which in common with his fellow citizens he has a natural right; that it tends also to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing, with a monopoly of worldly honors and emoluments, those who will externally profess and conform to it; that though indeed these are

criminal who do not withstand such temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles, on the supposition of their ill tendency, is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty, because he being of course judge of that tendency, will make his opinions the rule of judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own; that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt actions against peace and good order; and, finally, that truth is great, and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to

error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.

"Be it therefore enacted by the General Assembly, That no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.

"And though we well know that this Assembly, elected by the people for the ordinary purposes of legislation only, have no power to restrain the acts of succeeding Assemblies, constituted with the powers equal to our own, and that therefore to declare this act irrevocable, would be of no effect in law, yet we are free to declare, and do declare, that the rights hereby asserted are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right."

no religious test for American citizens or American officials. But it was not until the first Congress met under the Constitution that the First Amendment was adopted expressly withholding from the national Legislature authority to make any "law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

James Madison fathered the Virginia Bill of Rights, and finally secured its passage through the Assembly. The next year Madison was requested by the Continental Congress to draft a Federal Constitution, and the one idea that was uppermost in the mind of this great American statesman and his compatriots of Virginia, was that individual freedom in matters of religion might become a part of the highest law of the land.

During the Constitutional Convention of 1787, George Washington, James Madison, Patrick Henry, and George Mason the illustrous quartet from Virginia insisted strongly upon having

But notwithstanding such was the attitude of the general government, many of the States have refused to repeal the Sunday blue laws handed down as relics of a dead past. California and Oregon

are the only States that have fully complied with the demands of the Federal Constitution, and do not today have a single religious law upon their statute books. And morally the people of these two States rank among the highest. May the time come when all our State laws on this subject shall harmonize with our Federal guaranties of religious liberty.

Does not loyalty to the spirit of our free institutions demand that the several States of the Union shall guarantee to each citizen every privilege and immunity vouchsafed to every national citizen by the Federal Constitution? Certainly. deed, the Fourteenth Amendment contemplates this very thing, for it provides that "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States." The courts have construed this as protecting corporations; should it not also extend to individual citizens?

In

American

C. S. Longacre

I

FI were asked," said Oscar S. Straus, thrice American ambassador to Turkey, and Secretary of Labor and Commerce in President Roosevelt's Cabinet, "to select from all the great men who have left their impress upon this continent from the days that the Puritan Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock, . . . if I were asked whom to hold before the American people and the world to typify the American spirit of fairness, of freedom, of liberty in church and state, I would without any hesitation select that great prophet who established the first political community on the basis of a free church in a free state, the great and immortal Roger Williams."

When Roger Williams landed in America in 1631, he found that his Puritan brethren who had preceded him by eleven years, had already established their religion by law, and were persecuting those who dissented from them in belief. Upon his arrival, he was offered the pastorate of the Boston church, which the peo

the purity of church communion, than all Christendom besides." Cotton Mather said that Williams was a "madman " and had "a windmill in his head." It would have been much better for America if more madmen of the Roger Williams type, having " windmills" in their heads, had come to America.

Williams was the first American who advocated the complete and absolute separation of church and state. At a time when there was no historical example to follow he founded the first colony that made religious liberty an actuality

ple of Boston called "the most glorious on earth." But Roger Williams declined the offer because he felt that he could not conscientiously bind himself to a legally established church.

John Cotton said that Williams looked upon himself as one who "had received a clearer illumination and apprehension of the state of Christ's kingdom, and of

for all men, whether Christians, Jews, Gentiles, Turks, or agnostics.

Because he was the first to assert and to contend for these glorious principles of civil and religious liberty, which have since become the distinctive characteristics of our fundamental law and national greatness, he has properly been called "The First American."

Roger Williams purchased his land from the Indians,- a new thing under the sun, which shows the kindly disposition of the man.

From the first, the Indians believed in Roger Williams, and after his Christian brethren in Boston and Salem banished him, in the middle of a severely cold. winter, the Indians gave him food and shelter. Subsequently, when the Puritan settlers were threatened with extinction at the hands of the savage Indians, Williams, at the risk of his own life, made a long trip to visit the chiefs of the hostile tribes to dissuade them from their murderous plot, and succeeded in his hazardous undertaking.

And yet, in spite of all this kindness, well known to the Puritans of Massachusetts, their religious prejudices against Roger Williams remained unabated. They wanted him to recant his doctrines of soul liberty. But he stoutly contended that the civil magistrate

had no right to enforce the first four commandments of the decalogue,- those four commandments, among "the eternal ten," which regulate a man's duty toward God. He was opposed to all their Sunday laws and other strictly religious legislation, and because of his opposition to these religio-civil laws, they tried him twice before the high court at Boston on the charge of being guilty of heresy against the established church and of treason against the state. They also condemned him for his acceptance of the doctrine. of baptism by immersion.

After his banishment by the Massachusetts court, Williams started his new colony for the oppressed of all faiths and nations, founding the city of Providence, R. I., where he also established the first Baptist church in America. The old bell in the tower of this church weighs

able friend in Roger Williams, as well as a convert to their old-time faith in the immutability of God's law of ten commandments as written by the finger of God at Mt. Sinai.

While the Puritans fled from European oppression to America where they might worship God unmolested and establish freedom of conscience, they utterly missed their idea when they established their own religion and church by civil law, and thus formed a union of church and state. This resulted in establishing religious liberty only for Puri

While the Congregational Church of Massachusetts was far in advance in church policy and government of the Established Church of England, yet both held in common the doctrine of church establishments, and this was the taproot and prime cause inspiring each with the

spirit of intolerance and persecution. Even so great a reformer as Martin Luther could see this great truth of the equality of soul liberty only when his own soul was oppressed. In the early years of his Reformation work, when he was opposed on every hand, he said:

"No one can command or ought to command the soul except God, who alone can show it the way to heaven. It is futile and impossible to command, or by force to compel any man's belief. Heresy is a spiritual thing, which no iron can hew down, no fire burn, no water drown. . . Whenever the temporal power presumes to legislate for the soul, it encroaches."

But when Luther was successful, and he had his opponents at his mercy, he turned his back upon this gracious and noble utterance, and compromised with error and force. Thus he robbed his name and cause of the splendor and glory of a complete triumph in the Refor mation. He espoused a state religion, and in after-y ears he wrote differently:

"Since it is not good that in one parish the people should be exposed to contradictory preaching, he (the magistrate) should order to be silent whatever does not consist with the Scriptures."

worship the true God, and to maintain the unity of the faith."

There was not a creed formulated by any Protestant Reformer prior to Roger Williams, which explicitly challenged the right of civil power in religious concerns. As soon as Roger Williams set foot upon American soil, he found himself in conflict with the highest civil and religious authorities. He could not endure to see his brethren oppressed for conscience' sake. He protested when the civil magistrate meddled with religious obligations. He wanted America to be the home of the free and an asylum for the oppressed of Europe. When he himself was driven

Thus Luther simply changed the civil magistrate from a Catholic to a Protestant tyrant, to suppress what he would condemn in place of what the Pope would condemn. Most of us, if we had the power, would make fairly good popes. The only thing that will hinder the best of us Christians from exercising such arbitrary power and authority over those who dissent from us, is a law that forbids the use of force in religion. Otherwise men will smite and kill one another, thinking that they are doing "God service."

Likewise John Calvin believed in religious liberty, but only for himself and the people of his own faith. He said:

"Godly princes may lawfully issue edicts for compelling obstinate and rebellious persons to

from Massachusetts, he founded such a republic in miniature, and it has now grown into a giant. "The divers new and dangerous opinions" for which Roger Williams was banished by the Puritan commonwealth have become the chief corner-stone of the great American Republic. Impartial historians accord him the honor and rank of "the first great American," " the first great Republican," and "the American apostle of soul liberty."

Sweetener of hut and hall,

Bringer of life out of naught; Freedom, O fairest of all

The daughters of time and of thought. - Dr. Eliot.