"Let the religion be taught and preached in its parity throughout your
provinces without the least mixture," said Sir Ralph Winwood, in the name
of his sovereign.

"On this foundation the justice of your cause is built. There is but one
verity. Those who are willing to tolerate any religion, whatever it may
be, and try to make you believe that liberty for both is necessary in
your commonwealth, are paving the way towards atheism."

Such were the counsels of King James to the united States of the
Netherlands against harbouring Catholics. A few years later he was
casting forth Calvinists from his own dominions as if they had been
lepers; and they went forth on their weary pilgrimage to the howling
wilderness of North America, those exiled Calvinists, to build a greater
republic than had ever been dreamed of before on this planet; and they
went forth, not to preach, but in their turn to denounce toleration and
to hang heretics. "He who would tolerate another religion that his own
may be tolerated, would if need be, hang God's bible at the devil's
girdle." So spoke an early Massachusetts pilgrim, in the very spirit,
almost the very words of the royal persecutor; who had driven him into
outer darkness beyond the seas. He had not learned the lesson of the
mighty movement in which he was a pioneer, any more than Gomarus or
Uytenbogaart had comprehended why the Dutch republic had risen.

Yet the founders of the two commonwealths, the United States of the
seventeenth and of the nineteenth centuries, although many of them
fiercely intolerant, through a natural instinct of resistance, not only
to the oppressor but to the creed of the oppressor, had been breaking out
the way, not to atheism, as King James believed, but to the only garden
in which Christianity can perennially flourish--religious liberty.

Those most ardent and zealous path-finders may be forgiven, in view of
the inestimable benefits conferred by them upon humanity, that they did
not travel on their own road. It should be sufficient for us, if we make
due use of their great imperishable work ourselves; and if we never cease
rendering thanks to the Omnipotent, that there is at least one great
nation on the globe where the words toleration and dissenter have no
meaning whatever.

For the Dutch fanatics of the reformed church, at the moment of the
truce, to attempt to reverse the course of events, and to shut off the
mighty movement of the great revolt from its