The idea that state and government rested upon a compact—so significant for the development of the American conceptions of individual liberty—was strengthened by the force of historical circumstances. A handful of men went forth to found new communities. They began their work of civilization scattered over wide stretches in the loneliness of the primeval forest.[80] And so they believed that it was possible to live outside of the state, in a condition of nature, and that when they stepped out of that condition of nature they did it of their own free will and were not constrained by any earthly power. With their small numbers, representation was at first unnecessary, and the decisions were reached in the town meetings of all belonging to the community,—the form of a direct democracy grew naturally out of the given conditions and strengthened the conviction, which does not correspond to the old English conception, that the sovereignty of the people is the basis of legislation and of government. To a generation that could point to such beginnings for their state, the political ideas which later animated the men of 1776 seemed to bear their surety in themselves: they were "self-evident", as it reads in the Declaration of Independence.
The inherent fundamental right of religious liberty, for which Roger Williams had striven so earnestly, found also in the seventeenth century its official recognition in law, first in the laws of 1647 of Rhode Island, and then in the charter which Charles II. granted the colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in 1663.[81] It was therein ordered in fulfilment of the colonists' request, in a manner ever memorable, that in future in the said colony no person should be molested, punished or called in question for any differences of opinion in matters of religion; but that all persons at all times should have full liberty of conscience, so long as they behaved themselves peaceably and did not misuse this liberty in licentiousness or profaneness, nor to the injury or disturbance of others.[82] Thus a colony was granted that which in the mother-country at the time was contested to the utmost. Similar principles are found for the first time in Europe in the Practice of Frederick the Great in Prussia. But the principles of religious liberty were recognized to a greater or less extent in other colonies also. Catholic Maryland in 1649 granted freedom in the exercise of religion to every one who acknowledged Jesus Christ.[83] Also that remarkable constitution which Locke prepared for North Carolina and that went into force there in 1669, and which agrees so little with the tenets of his Two Treatises on Government, is based upon the principle not, it is true, of full equality of rights, but of toleration of Dissenters, and also of Jews and heathen.[84] It was permitted every seven persons of any religion to form a church or communion of faith.[85] No compulsion in matters of religion was exercised, except that every inhabitant when seventeen years of age had to declare to which communion he belonged and to be registered in some church, otherwise he stood outside of the protection of the law.[86] All violence toward any religious assembly was strictly prohibited.[87] It was not the principle of political liberty that lay on Locke's heart, but the opening of a way to full religious liberty. In spite of the fact that in his treatise On Civil Government there is not a word upon the right of conscience, which he had so energetically defended in his celebrated Letters on Toleration, the constitution of North Carolina shows that in his practical plans it held the first place. And so with Locke also liberty of conscience was brought forward as the first and most sacred right, overshadowing all others. This philosopher, who held freedom to be man's inalienable gift from nature, established servitude and slavery under the government he organized without hesitation, but religious toleration he carried through with great energy in this new feudal state.
Of the other colonies New Jersey had proclaimed extensive toleration in 1664, and New York in 1665.[88] In the latter, which had already declared under Dutch rule in favor of liberal principles in religious matters, it was ordered in 1683 that no one who believed on Jesus Christ should on any pretext whatever be molested because of difference of opinion. In the same year William Penn conferred a constitution with democratic basis upon the colony granted to him by the Crown and which he had named after his father Pennsylvania, in which it was declared that no one who believed on God should in any way be forced to take part in any religious worship or be otherwise molested,[89] and in the constitution, which Penn later (1701) established and which remained in force until 1776, he emphasized above all that even when a people were endowed with the greatest civil liberties they could not be truly happy, unless liberty of conscience were recognized,[90] and at the close he solemnly promised for himself and his heirs that the recognition of this liberty, which he had declared, should remain forever inviolable and that the wording of the article should not be changed in any particular.[91] The constitutional principle was thus given at once the force of a lex in perpetuum valitura.
In 1692 Massachusetts received a charter from William III. in which, following the example of the Toleration Act of 1689, full liberty was granted to all Christians except Catholics;[92] and Georgia was given a similar law in 1732 by George II.[93]
Thus the principles of religious liberty to a greater or less extent acquired constitutional recognition in America. In the closest connection with the great religious political movement out of which the American democracy was born, there arose the conviction that there exists a right not conferred upon the citizen but inherent in man, that acts of conscience and expressions of religious conviction stand inviolable over against the state as the exercise of a higher right. This right so long suppressed is no "inheritance", is nothing handed down from their fathers, as the rights and liberties of Magna Charta and of the other English enactments,—not the State but the Gospel proclaimed it.
What in Europe at that time and even much later had received official expression only in scanty rudiments,[94] and aside from that was only asserted in the literature of the great intellectual movement which began in the seventeenth century and reached its height in the clearing-up epoch of the century following, was in Rhode Island and other colonies a recognized principle of the state by the middle of the seventeenth century. The right of the liberty of conscience was proclaimed, and with it came the conception of a universal right of man. In 1776 this right was designated by all the bills of rights, mostly in emphatic form and with precedence over all others, as a natural and inherent right.[95]
The character of this right is emphasized by the bill of rights of New Hampshire, which declares that among the natural rights some are inalienable because no one can offer an equivalent for them. Such are the rights of conscience.[96]
The idea of legally establishing inalienable, inherent and sacred rights of the individual is not of political but religious origin. What has been held to be a work of the Revolution was in reality a fruit of the Reformation and its struggles. Its first apostle was not Lafayette but Roger Williams, who, driven by powerful and deep religious enthusiasm, went into the wilderness in order to found a government of religious liberty, and his name is uttered by Americans even to-day with the deepest respect.
FOOTNOTES:
[66] Weingarten, Die Revolutionskirchen Englands, p. 21.