, in issuing his declaration
suspending the penal laws, he had transcended the rightful prerogative of
his throne. The power which he exercised had been used by his
predecessors for far less worthy purposes, and with the approbation of
many of the very men who now opposed him. His ostensible object,
expressed in language which even those who condemn his policy cannot but
admire, was a laudable and noble one. "We trust," said he, "that it will
not be vain that we have resolved to use our utmost endeavors to
establish liberty of conscience on such just and equal foundations as
will render it unalterable, and secure to all people the free exercise of
their religion, by which future ages may reap the benefit of what is so
undoubtedly the general good of the whole kingdom." Whatever may have
been the motive of this declaration,--even admitting the suspicions of
his enemies to have been true, that he advocated universal toleration as
the only means of restoring Roman Catholics to all the rights and
privileges of which the penal laws deprived them,--it would seem that
there could have been no very serious objection on the part of real
friends of religious toleration to the taking of him at his word and
placing Englishmen of every sect on an equality before the law. The
Catholics were in a very small minority, scarcely at that time as
numerous as the Quakers and Anabaptists. The army, the navy, and nine
tenths of the people of England were Protestants. Real danger,
therefore, from a simple act of justice towards their Catholic fellow-
citizens, the people of England had no ground for apprehending. But the
great truth, which is even now but imperfectly recognized throughout
Christendom, that religious opinions rest between man and his Maker, and
not between man and the magistrate, and that the domain of conscience is
sacred, was almost unknown to the statesmen and schoolmen of the
seventeenth century. Milton--ultra liberal as he was--excepted the
Catholics from his plan of toleration. Locke, yielding to the prejudices
of the time, took the same ground. The enlightened latitudinarian
ministers of the Established Church--men whose talents and Christian
charity redeem in some measure the character of that Church in the day of
its greatest power and basest apostasy--stopped short of universal
toleration. The Presbyterians excluded Quakers, Baptists, and Papists
from the pale of their charity. With the single exception of