it, therefore it is not lawful for any whosoever, by virtue of any authority or principality they boast in the government of this world, to force the consciences of others; and therefore all killing, banishing, fineing, imprisoning, and other such things which are inflicted upon men for the alone exercise of their conscience or difference in worship or opinion, proceedeth from the spirit of Cain the murderer, and is contrary to the truth; providing always that no man, under the pretense of conscience, prejudice his neighbor in his life or estate, or do anything destructive to or inconsistent with human society; in which case the law is for the transgressor, and justice is to be administered upon all without respect of persons."

The declared equality of all religions, under the general direction of the State, is the second point in the advance from absolutism toward religious freedom. This was the principle established by Napoleon toward Protestant, Catholic, and Jew. It is an advance upon toleration, because, in theory, no one religion is inferior to another, or exists by sufferance under the shadow of a favorite establishment. But a legalized equality of religions falls short of religious freedom; because, upon this system, every religion is subsidized by the State, and in a measure subject to its regulation. Thus the Prussian constitution provides that "those religious societies or clerical bodies, which have no corporate rights, can obtain such rights only by means of special laws."

Still another point must be gained before religious freedom is secured; non-intervention by the State either for the support or the direction of the institutions of religion, but full and equal protection for all persons in their religious faith and worship. This principle is incorporated in the Constitution of the United States, which declares that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thoreof." We, first of all the nations of Christendom, have attained to this complete emancipation from State control in matters of religion. The Revolution of 1688 is regarded by Hallam as the Magna Charta of the privileges of conscience in England. Yet, of the Act of Toleration from which Papists and such as deny the Trinity were excluded, he

says, "we may justly deem this act a very scanty measure of religious liberty." And notwithstanding all that has since been gained, to-day the Dissenting majority in England worship unmolested, not by virtue of an integral right of the British subject, but by the prescriptive right of toleration, dating back less than two centuries, and still hampered by tith ings and other marks of bondage to the State-Church; while that Church itself, with the hereditary glory of its bishops and its universities, with its treasures of learning and of piety, is declared by decree of the Court of Arches, to be amenable to the strict legal construction of its Articles by the representative of the Crown; and the recommendation of the Bishop of Oxford that there should be a pause in the morning prayer for a silent invocation of peace in America, is denounced as contrary to the Act of Uniformity of Charles II.

What thanks we owe to those Pilgrim Separatists who from pains and prisons, and through long and cheerless exile, brought religious freedom to our shores! What thanks we owe to the framers of our Constitution, for the sagacity and the justice, that incorporated this principle of religious liberty with the organic structure of the nation! What thanks we owe to God that we are the free-born heirs of the liberty that others purchased at so great a price! What thanks!—and what obligations to maintain this right, untrammeled, for all men, and to transmit it unimpaired to other generations! For, while there is little danger of direct political interference with our relig ious liberties, there is an oft-recurring danger that by theological and ecclesiastical narrowness upon either hand, this right may be infringed upon, until the true spirit of religious freedom shall be destroyed, and churches born to liberty be brought under bondage to some exterior regime of dogma or of discipline. Congregationalists owe some special duties to the cause of Religious Liberty in this regard. They, of all men, must maintain those two grand citadels of liberty-the selfdetermination of conscience under the sole authority of God's law, the self-government of the local Church under the sole authority of Christ. To hamper conscience by any conventional law or power, is to invade the prerogative of Jehovah

to the allegiance of the human soul; to curtail the autonomy of the particular church by rules imposed ab extra, or by the coercion of numbers, is to invade the headship of Christ over his own members. Freedom is rooted in right; right in conscience; and conscience is seated in the individual. Yet the freedom of the individual conscience is amenable to a law higher than itself-even the absolute and immutable law of Right, whose highest expression is in the will of God. Whatever legislation in Church or State comes between conscience and this Higher Law, strikes at the root and life of all liberty. But the individual cannot be isolated even in rights and liberties that center in his innermost being. He is in, of, and for society; and therefore rights and liberties that grow out from conscience as the tap-root of freedom and virtue, take on social forms of incorporation and development. The problem of publicists is how to adjust the minimum of government to the maximum of personal freedom and responsibility and of associated security and power. In matters of religion, the New Testament has solved that problem, by the independent constitution and self-government of each society of Christians, and the sympathetic intercommunion both of individual believers and of churches, for moral strength, judgment, purity, and unity,—each and the whole subject to the unimpaired authority of the Lord Jesus Christ. There is the organic expression and defense of religious liberty. And as before said, the heirs of the Pilgrims' faith and polity have it in solemn charge, as the trust of history, to maintain the liberty of the individual conscience in all matters of religious opinion and action, and the liberty of voluntary, independent, self-governing association for the organic utterance of faith and the organic rendering of worship. We cannot go back of these principles for any idea of liberty; and it is hazardous to liberty to depart from these principles in any manner or degree.

Yet the lust of power and of uniformity on the one hand and the lust of egoism and of eccentricity on the other, expose us to violate in opposite ways these grand safeguards of freedom in the truth;-in the way of organization as a means of power, of regulation, of uniformity; or in the way of isolation,

whether for the assumption or the negation of responsibility. Organization becomes the bane of voluntaryism as soon as it is made the means of control over the personal and the particu-lar; and isolation becomes the bane of independence as soon as it is used to relieve one from a just responsibility for truth, or from the delicate and sometimes critical discriminations of charity. Any style of organization that tends to erect an ecclesiastical directory, whether of faith, government, or worship, superior to the particular church, is an encroachment upon the liberty of the gospel, and leads not to strength, unity, and purity, but to weakness, schism, and corruption. And, on the other hand, an extreme of independency, that affects to know nothing, or to care nothing about the opinions and doings of others of the same name and faith, is the liberty of licentiousness that runs at last into the petty tyranny of selfwill, and the petty meanness of self-worship;-making each church, if it shall please, a star-chamber to defame character and destroy liberty without redress, and each pastor a pope in his own pulpit. Such independency subverts liberty by anarchy, which swallows up alike truth, freedom, unity. Liberty demands Christian unity no less than it denies Church uniformity; but this unity is neither a vessel of divers metals, some pure, some base, held together by outward hoops and bands, nor a fortuitous concourse of self-moving atoms in a given locality-as Epicurus conceived the world; but the unity of moral affinities held together under the law of Christ, working in each and all. We must keep in mind, as Lord Bacon has said, that "they be two things, Unity and Uniformity. Concerning the means of procuring Unity, men must beware, that in the procuring or muniting of religious unity, they do not dissolve and deface the laws of charity and of human society. . . . . Men create oppositions which are not; and put them into new terms so fixed, as whereas the meaning ought to govern the term, the term in effect governeth the meaning." We must guard against the domination of the letter either in faith or in order. The beauty of the Congregational system is that it combines a central vitality of principle with flexibility of outward development. Binding

each man to a living faith in the Christ of the New Testament, and a loyal devotion to the Bible as God's revealed and authoritative word, it leaves him to preach in a silk gown or a linen duster, from pulpit or from platform, as seems him best; it leaves each church to pray by book, or by unwritten speech; to sing by choir, or by congregation, to open the service or to close it, with the Doxology; to sit, stand, or kneel in prayer; and fidelity at once to truth and to liberty demands that we be rigid in principles, charitable in spirit, flexible in forms.

Above all things must we be found faithful to conscience and to freedom. We were false to all that makes us what we are, should we falter at either point in the yet unfinished battle for Right and Liberty; unfinished, alas, even upon this soil, more than two hundred years after the Pilgrims gave both to the free winds of heaven. The struggle of conscience for right and liberty again breaks forth in the shock of arms. Conscience demanding freedom for the pulpit to plead the cause of the oppressed; conscience demanding for every man freedom to read and obey the word of God; conscience rebuking the political and social tyranny that had smitten even churches and religious book, school, and mission societies with a disgraceful pusillanimity; conscience ever untamable, irrepressible, has stirred the wrath of earth and hell to put it down. We may not falter in the tremendous issue that the principles of the Puritans have thus evoked. We must prove ourselves the children of the prophets; giving thought, time money, labor, prayer, our sons' lives and our own, to establish forever in this land, freedom and righteousness. And while we recall the pains and sufferings of two centuries ago, we may take up the sublime invocation and ascription of Milton, for the furthering of the Reformation even by civil wars: "Parent of angels and men, Omnipotent King, Redeemer of the lost, be moved with pity at the afflicted state of this our shaken country, that now lies laboring under her throes, and struggling against the grudges of more dreadful calamities.

O thou that didst build up this empire to a glorious and enviable hight, stay us in this felicity; let not the obstinacy of our half-obedience and will-worship bring forth that viper of sedi