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is farther from the truth, for the Puritans came solely for the purpose of establishing their own church, and did not tolerate [even] other Protestants, whether Baptists, Quakers, or other sect. Not until Roger Williams, driven from Massachusetts Bay colony, chiefly because of his religious heresy, founded Providence in Rhode Island, and declared that the state and religion must be separated, that the government should have no control over religion, and that therefore any one might worship as he wished, did religious liberty find its first foothold in the modern world."-"Modern European Civilization,' pp. 22, 23. Published by the Macmillan Company, New York.

From a literary viewpoint, Dr. Eliot's inscription is faultless; from the viewpoint of exact historical statement, it is misleading.

Quakers and Baptists especially fared ill at the hands of the Pilgrims and others of like faith. Even the worship of the Church of England was permitted by the Puritans, only because, being British subjects, they dared not forbid that which the crown not only permitted but actively supported.

But in claiming liberty for themselves, the Pilgrims and other Puritans set a worthy example. They challenged the right of the British crown to dominate their religious faith and practice, and in due time others challenged their right of domination in matters of conscience. Adherents of the Church of England claimed the right to worship according to its forms. Quakers claimed the right to their simple faith and practice, as did also the Baptists. The authority of the king and of the royal governor guaranteed the rights of the churchmen. The Quakers, after sacrificing even to the laying down of life for their faith, won for themselves the liberty the Puritans long denied them. The same is true of the Baptists. From the heat of Puritan intolerance Roger Williams fled to the cold of a New England winter, to find, among untutored savages, in the pathless forests, that freedom of worship denied him in Puritan Massachusetts.

Williams founded Rhode Island, making freedom of conscience one of its chief corner-stones. The Lord Proprietary of Maryland, himself a Roman Catholic, in

order to make secure for himself and his coreligionists freedom of worship, made the rules of his colony so broad and liberal that both Quakers and Baptists found refuge there from the intolerance alike of Puritanism in Massachusetts and of Episcopacy in Virginia.

Yes, in the words of Emerson, the Pilgrim

"Builded better than he knew;

The conscious stone to beauty grew.”

And now men honor him for what he was and for the finished, polished structure, rather than for the original crude design.

The Massachusetts colonists generally get a good deal more credit than they deserve for establishing religious liberty on these shores and laying the foundations of the American Republic. The truth is, their ideal was a theocracy modeled after the theocracy of Israel as closely as man could make it. Not the people as a whole, but the clergy were to rule, and for a time did rule.

Cotton Mather, thundering in his pulpit or mounted on his horse, demanding the execution of "witches," had more influence than Judge Sewall, declaring the law from the judicial bench.

It was Roger Williams and other dissenters from the harshness of Puritan doctrine and the rigors of Puritan rule who by the hardships they endured, the banishment and imprisonments they suffered, the lives they laid down, established religious liberty in New England; and it was Quakers, Baptists, Presbyterians, and Roman Catholics who performed the same great service in the South. While the spirit of revolt at first rose higher in Massachusetts than in Virginia, it must not be forgotten that it was Thomas Jefferson, a Virginian, who wrote the Declaration of Independence. and James Madison, another Virginian, who is known as the father of the Constitution, with its ample safeguards of liberty of conscience for all men of all faiths, or of no religious faith at all, and of no religious profession.

By the Editor

T

HE year 1920 has a double distinc

tion, since it marks the three hundredth anniversary of the two great historic events which ultimately led to the founding of the American Republic. One was the signing of the "Mayflower Compact" and the landing of the Pilgrims; and the other was the convening of the first American legislative assembly in Virginia.

Captain John Smith, ignorant of the coming of the Pilgrims, met with his fellow colonists at James City (Jamestown), Va., for the purpose of laying the foundation of what a century and a half later became the democratic form of government in the United States. And the Pilgrims, ignorant of the doings of the Virginia settlement, likewise resolved to establish, as generally stated, a government upon "the principles of civil and religious liberty and the practice of a genuine democracy." All this occurred in the year 1620. Thus the North and the South share equal honors this year in the Anglo-SaxonAmerican celebration of this tercentenary.

and in completely divorcing the church. and the state, thus throwing off for the first time the shackles of religious oppression. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Patrick Henry, and George Mason were the five stalwarts in the Virginia legislature and commonwealth who opened the fight against any union of church and state, and who finally succeeded, in 1785, in establishing religious freedom in Virginia. Massachusetts can boast of many things, but the Puritan grip upon that State was not released, so far as religious establishment by civil law was concerned, until more than half a century after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Massachusetts maintained the establishment of the Congregational Church as a State church until 1833, while her Sunday blue law enacted under the old régime of a union of church and

While Roger Williams succeeded in establishing in his Rhode Island colony the first model republic granting full civil and religious liberty to all citizens alike, Virginia was the first State in the Union that succeeded in disestablishing religion where it had been established,

state, she has retained to this day, notwithstanding the guaranties of religious liberty vouchsafed to each citizen in the Federal Constitution, and also in her own fundamental law.

Some Americans have believed that from the moment we declared our independence from England we have enjoyed full civil and religious liberty in the United States. This is a very mistaken idea. We have full religious liberty guaranteed to us only in our Fed