sburg and Rome,
it seemed there could be no danger in cropping the ears of a Puritan.

But an age of stronger conviction had arrived; and men resolved to
abandon the ancient ways that led to the scaffold and the rack, and to
make the wisdom of their ancestors and the statutes of the land bow
before an unwritten law. Religious liberty had been the dream of great
Christian writers in the age of Constantine and Valentinian, a dream
never wholly realised in the Empire, and rudely dispelled when the
barbarians found that it exceeded the resources of their art to govern
civilised populations of another religion, and unity of worship was
imposed by laws of blood and by theories more cruel than the laws. But
from St. Athanasius and St. Ambrose down to Erasmus and More, each age
heard the protest of earnest men in behalf of the liberty of conscience,
and the peaceful days before the Reformation were full of promise that
it would prevail.

In the commotion that followed, men were glad to get tolerated
themselves by way of privilege and compromise, and willingly renounced
the wider application of the principle. Socinus was the first who, on
the ground that Church and State ought to be separated, required
universal toleration. But Socinus disarmed his own theory, for he was a
strict advocate of passive obedience.

The idea that religious liberty is the generating principle of civil,
and that civil liberty is the necessary condition of religious, was a
discovery reserved for the seventeenth century. Many years before the
names of Milton and Taylor, of Baxter and Locke were made illustrious by
their partial condemnation of intolerance, there were men among the
Independent congregations who grasped with vigour and sincerity the
principle that it is only by abridging the authority of States that the
liberty of Churches can be assured. That great political idea,
sanctifying freedom and consecrating it to God, teaching men to treasure
the liberties of others as their own, and to defend them for the love of
justice and charity more than as a claim of right, has been the soul of
what is great and good in the progress of the last two hundred years.
The cause of religion, even under the unregenerate influence of worldly
passion, had as much to do as any clear notions of policy in making
this country the foremost of the free. It had been the deepest current
in the movement of 1641, and it remained the strongest motive that
survived the rea