the Church of England entered the colony and was formally established by the colonial legislature of 1758. The colony was divided into eight parishes, and a stipend of £25 allowed to the clergy. In 1769 there were but two Churches of the establishment in the entire colony.

The chief interest of this short narrative of Georgia, in our study, is its beginning with a religious liberty knowing but one restriction, and its finish with an idle attempt to establish a Church, to which as an establishment was fated but a short lease of power. The breaking out of the Revolution destroyed what little semblance of life it ever had.

1

VII

THE FREE COLONIES

AGAINST the world-wide principle of union between Church and State, which found more or less of power in twelve of the colonial foundations in America, there were three colonies to protest from their beginnings, with no uncertain sound. They were Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and Delaware.

It

But there was a marked difference between them. The voice of Rhode Island, under the tutelage of Roger Williams, was far more emphatic than that of the Quaker colonies. not only decreed a complete severance of state from Church, but forbade to the magistrate any inquiry whatsoever into the views of the citizen on matters of religion. Pennsylvania, — out of which the independent colony of Delaware afterward sprang, ― founded and guided by Quaker influence, never attained to so broad a view of religious liberty; for, while denying the propriety of any religious establishment, it still incorporated in its fundamental law an invidious distinction founded on religious opinions-a part of which distinction remains to this day. This distinction is as to belief in the existence of God, upon which was and still is conditioned the right of inhabitancy and citizenship. It is but fair to add, however, that this distinction seems to have been made rather as an expression of opinion and desire on the part of the founders, than as a practical rule of exclusion. No instance of interference with an individual for atheistic opinion is recorded in the colonial history. Nor is it to be supposed that, to-day, the law would challenge an atheist's right to all the privileges of a citizen. Practically, the liberty of the individual in religious matters was from the beginning

nearly so well assured in Pennsylvania as in the colony of Williams. To the latter, however, belongs the signal honor of first defining that liberty in constitutional terms, untrammelled by any past or present prejudices, with a breadth of view and fulness of statement unsurpassed by any legal prescriptions of a later day.

I. Rhode Island

The history of Rhode Island, so far as concerns religious liberty, is both brief and illustrious. It began with Roger Williams, the fugitive from Massachusetts' ecclesiasticism. Himself the first among philosophers and statesmen, since the day of Constantine, to proclaim the complete freedom of mind and conscience from all civil bonds, he became the founder of the first state in whose fundamental law that freedom was incorporated, not only as a charter of liberty, but as the actual reason and purpose of the state's existence. In this latter particular, indeed, the colony of Rhode Island stands alone, owing its origin, not only to that desire for liberty which brought the Pilgrim and Puritan to New England, but to the set and acknowledged purpose, a purpose confessed by its founders and assented to by the king, "to hold forth a lively experiment, that a most flourishing civil The expe State may stand and best be maintained, with a full liberty of religious concernments."

ment.

Mason.

The beginning of it may best be told in the words of Williams himself in a letter to Major Mason of Connecticut, Letter to written at Providence under date of June 22, 1670, thirtyfour years after Williams's flight from Salem.1 The occasion of the letter was made by some suggested encroachments by the surrounding colonies on the territory of Rhode Island, and it reviews some of the writer's early experiences. "When I was unkindly and unChristianly, as I believe, driven from my house and land and wife and children (in the midst of New England winter, now about thirty-five years ago) at

1 Massachusetts Historical Collections, I, 275.

Salem, that ever honoured Governor, Mr. Winthrop, wrote to me to steer my course to the Nahiganset Bay and Indians, for many high and heavenly and publick ends, incouraging me from the freenes of the place from any English claims or patents. I took his prudent motion as an hint and voice from God, and waving all other thoughts and motions, I steered my course from Salem (though in winter snow which I feel now) unto these parts, wherein I may say Peniel, that is, I have seene the face of God. . . . I first pitch't and begun to build and plant at Secunk, now Rehoboth, but I received a letter from my antient friend, Mr. Winslow, then governor of Plymouth, (saying) . . . I was fallen into the edge of their bounds, and they were lothe to displease the Bay, but to remove to the other side of the water, and there I had the country free before me."

This advice also Williams followed, and named his new vidence. settlement PROVIDENCE. But Massasoit claimed that the land about Providence was his and therefore Plymouth's, out of which claim came much disturbance to Williams, until Governor Bradford and others declared, "that I should not be molested and tost up and down againe, while their breath was in their bodies. And surely between those my friends of the Bay and Plymouth I was sorely tost for one fourteen weeks in a bitter winter season, not knowing what bread or bed did meane. God knows that many thousand pounds can not repay the many temporary losses I have sustained. ... It pleased the Father of Spirits to touch many hearts, dear to Him, with some relentings; amongst which that great and pious soule, Mr. Winslow, melted and kindly visited me at Providence and put a piece of gold into the hands of my wife for our support."

Williams then relates the attempt of Massachusetts to establish a claim upon the land about Providence, and the disallowance thereof by the king, and goes on to declare the main object of the colony: "But here, all over this colonie, a great number of weake and distressed soules scattered are

foundation.

flying hither from Old and New England. The Most High Design of and Only Wise hath in His infinite wisdom provided this country and this corner as a shelter for the poor and persecuted according to their several persuasions. And thus that heavenly man, Mr. Hains, Governour of Connecticut, though he pronounced the sentence of my long banishment against me at Cambridge, yet said unto me in his own house at Hartford, being then in some difference with the Bay, 'I must now confesse to you that the most wise God hath provided and cut out this part of His world for a refuge and receptacle for all kinds of consciences.""

Nothing could be sharper in contrast than the difference of view between the Puritans of the Bay and the Founder of Rhode Island. "The hostility of the Puritans," says Doyle,1 "to the Church of England was temporary and conditional. That of Williams was rooted in the nature of the institution. (The former) objected not to a secular control over the Church, but to secular control exercised for what they deemed wrong ends. To Williams a State-Church was an abomination, however it might be administered, and whether it abode in Rome, in England, or in Massachusetts."

Thus to the Puritan of the Bay his own Church, in its purity of doctrine and discipline, represented the supreme function and duty of the state; conformity became a necessary law, and dissent was both criminal and revolutionary. To Williams there were no possible intersections of the Church with the state. The two institutions were as separate and distinct as though their local habitations were divided by the earth's diameter: while the civil law had nothing to say about religion, save that each individual should be left free to the guidance of his own conscience; and the Church, or Churches, should be moulded and controlled by the desires and preferences of those who should voluntarily associate themselves therein.

Williams's own distinctions were clearly drawn, and as

1 Puritan Colonies, I, 155.