gion. By taking this broad ground they secured the powerful aid of
Thomas Jefferson, and afterwards of Madison and Mason. The controversy
went on through all the years of the Revolutionary War, while all
Virginia, from the sea to the mountains, rang with fulminations and
arguments. In 1776 Jefferson and Mason succeeded in carrying a bill
which released all dissenters from parish rates and legalized all forms
of worship. At last in 1785 Madison won the crowning victory in the
Religious Freedom Act, by which the Church of England was disestablished
and all parish rates abolished, and still more, all religious tests were
done away with. In this last respect Virginia came to the front among
all the American states, as Massachusetts had come to the front in the
abolition of negro slavery. Nearly all the states still imposed
religious tests upon civil office-holders, from simply declaring a
general belief in the infallibleness of the Bible to accepting the
doctrine of the Trinity. The Virginia statute, which declared that
"opinion in matters of religion shall in nowise diminish, enlarge, or
affect civil capacities," was translated into French and Italian, and
was widely read and commented on in Europe.

It is the historian's unpleasant duty to add that the victory thus
happily won was ungenerously followed up. Theological and political
odium combined to overwhelm the Episcopal church in Virginia. The
persecuted became persecutors. It was contended that the property of the
church, having been largely created by unjustifiable taxation, ought to
be forfeited. In 1802 its parsonages and glebe lands were sold, its
parishes wiped out, and its clergy left without a calling. "A reckless
sensualist," said Dr. Hawks, "administered the morning dram to his
guests from the silver cup" used in the communion service. But in all
this there is a manifest historic lesson. That it should have been
possible thus to deal with the Episcopal church in Virginia shows
forcibly the moribund condition into which it had been brought through
dependence upon the extraneous aid of a political sovereignty from which
the people of Virginia were severing their allegiance. The lesson is
most vividly enhanced by the contrast with the church of South Carolina
which, rooted in its own soil, was quite able to stand alone when
government aid was withdrawn. In Virginia the church in which George
Washington was reared had so nearly vanished by the year 1830 that Chief