and the conscience of free men.[32] Thus was exchanged
the dominion of will over will for the dominion of reason over reason.
The true apostles of toleration are not those who sought protection
for their own beliefs, or who had none to protect; but men to whom,
irrespective of their cause, it was a political, a moral, and a
theological dogma, a question of conscience, involving both religion
and policy.[33] Such a man was Socinus; and others arose in the
smaller sects--the Independent founder of the colony of Rhode Island,
and the Quaker patriarch of Pennsylvania. Much of the energy and zeal
which had laboured for authority of doctrine was employed for liberty
of prophesying. The air was filled with the enthusiasm of a new cry;
but the cause was still the same. It became a boast that religion was
the mother of freedom, that freedom was the lawful off spring of
religion; and this transmutation, this subversion of established forms
of political life by the development of religious thought, brings us
to the heart of my subject, to the significant and central feature of
the historic cycle before us. Beginning with the strongest religious
movement and the most refined despotism ever known, it has led to the
superiority of politics over divinity in the life of nations, and
terminates in the equal claim of every man to be unhindered by man in
the fulfilment of duty to God[34]--a doctrine laden with storm and
havoc, which is the secret essence of the Rights of Man, and the
indestructible soul of Revolution.

[Sidenote: THE MODE OF LIBERTY]

[Sidenote: PROGRESS]

[Sidenote: THE MARK OF PROVIDENCE]

When we consider what the adverse forces were, their sustained
resistance, their frequent recovery, the critical moments when the
struggle seemed for ever desperate, in 1685, in 1772, in 1808, it is
no hyperbole to say that the progress of the world towards
self-government would have been arrested but for the strength afforded
by the religious motive in the seventeenth century. And this
constancy of progress, of progress in the direction of organised and
assured freedom, is the characteristic fact of modern history, and its
tribute to the theory, of Providence.[35] Many persons, I am well
assured, would detect that this is a very old story, and a trivial
commonplace, and would challenge proof that the world is making
progress in aught but intellect, that it is gaining in freedom, or
that increase in freedom is either a progress