Religious conscience in colonial New England.

Religious freedom, unlike so many other American liberties, is largely an indigenous product. It is not an inheritance transplanted from Europe by the founding fathers, but is rather the outcome of peculiarly American circumstances and problems and is the end result of a slow and oftentimes painful experience. It is perhaps not an overstatement to assert that religious liberty is the great gift of America to civilization and to the world." (1)

The Europe on which the colonists turned their backs did not believe even in religious toleration, much less in religious liberty. "Nowhere on earth prior to 1640, unless it were in Holland, was toleration in any effective form whatsoever anything more than the dream of a few persecuted sectaries or deep private thinkers." (2) For over a thousand years previous to the settlement of America the Old World had developed the concept of a close union of church and state which had become axiomatic. The church was the mentor of the state, and the state the protector of the church. The failure properly to appreciate the mutual importance and necessity could but end in civil disorder. The civil authorities legislated for the benefit of a system of church beliefs and established a particular church as the advocate of the only legally approved set of religious tenets. Uniformity, at least in the outward manifestation, was regarded as essential to national unity.

In order to enforce this uniformity, Europe of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was rent by both religious wars and religious persecution. Protestant dissenters were harassed in Catholic Spain and France, while Catholics received like treatment in Protestant countries. In England the particular group to be mistreated depended upon the religion of the sovereign in power at the time.

Religious persecution and the religious wars which swept France, Germany, and the Low Countries were of a particularly bloody nature because of the certainty of the persecutors and of those waging war that God was at their right hand. An outstanding church historian has commented: "Of all forms of persecution, religious persecution is the worst because it is enacted in the name of God. It violates the sacred rights of conscience, and it arouses the strongest passions." (3)

Lord Bryce, in lauding the United States upon the religious liberty and separation of church and state which he found present, wrote:

Of all the differences between the Old World and the New this is perhaps the most salient. Half the wars of Europe, half the internal troubles that have vexed European states, from the Monophysite controversies in the Roman Empire of the fifth century down to the Kulturkarnpf in the German Empire of the nineteenth, have arisen from theological differences or from rival claims of church and state. (4)

THE RELIGIOUS MOTIVE IN THE ENGLISH COLONIZATION OF AMERICA