igion of "Nowhere" was in yet stronger conflict with
the faith of Christendom. It rested simply on nature and reason. It held
that God's design was the happiness of man, and that the ascetic rejection
of human delights, save for the common good, was thanklessness to the
Giver. Christianity indeed had already reached Utopia, but it had few
priests; religion found its centre rather in the family than in the
congregation: and each household confessed its faults to its own natural
head. A yet stranger characteristic was seen in the peaceable way in which
it lived side by side with the older religions. More than a century before
William of Orange More discerned and proclaimed the great principle of
religious toleration. In "Nowhere" it was lawful to every man to be of
what religion he would. Even the disbelievers in a Divine Being or in the
immortality of man, who by a single exception to its perfect religious
indifference were excluded from public office, were excluded, not on the
ground of their religious belief, but because their opinions were deemed
to be degrading to mankind and therefore to incapacitate those who held
them from governing in a noble temper. But they were subject to no
punishment, because the people of Utopia were "persuaded that it is not in
a man's power to believe what he list." The religion which a man held he
might propagate by argument, though not by violence or insult to the
religion of others. But while each sect performed its rites in private,
all assembled for public worship in a spacious temple, where the vast
throng, clad in white, and grouped round a priest clothed in fair raiment
wrought marvellously out of birds' plumage, joined in hymns and prayers so
framed as to be acceptable to all. The importance of this public devotion
lay in the evidence it afforded that liberty of conscience could be
combined with religious unity.

[Sidenote: Political Liberty]

But even more important than More's defence of religious freedom was his
firm maintenance of political liberty against the monarchy. Steady and
irresistible as was the growth of the royal power, it was far from seeming
to the keenest political thinker of that day so natural and inevitable a
developement of our history as it seems to some writers in our own. In
political hints which lie scattered over the whole of the Utopia More
notes with a bitter irony the advance of the new despotism. It was only in
"Nowhere" that a sovereign was "remo