One had to go back almost sixteen centuries to hear such sentiments. Then a Roman emperor had laid down the famous principle that religion was an affair between the individual man and his God and that God was quite capable of taking care of himself whenever he felt that his dignity had been injured.
The English people who had lived and prospered through four changes of government within less than sixty years were inclined to see the fundamental truth of such an ideal of tolerance based upon common sense.
When William of Orange crossed the North Sea in the year 1688, Locke followed him on the next ship, which carried the new Queen of England. Henceforth he lived a quiet and uneventful existence and when he died at the ripe old age of seventy-two he was known as a respectable author and no longer feared as a heretic.
Civil war is a terrible thing but it has one great advantage. It clears the atmosphere.
The political dissensions of the seventeenth century had completely consumed the superfluous energy of the English nation and while the citizens of other countries continued to kill each other for the sake of the Trinity and prenatal damnation, religious persecution in Great Britain came to an end. Now and then a too presumptuous critic of the established church, like Daniel Defoe, might come into unpleasant contact with the law, but the author of “Robinson Crusoe” was pilloried because he was a humorist rather than an amateur theologian and because the Anglo-Saxon race, since time immemorial, has felt an inborn suspicion of irony. Had Defoe written a serious defense of tolerance, he would have escaped with a reprimand. When he turned his attack upon the tyranny of the church into a semi-humorous pamphlet entitled “The Shortest Way with Dissenters,” he showed that he was a vulgar person without a decent sense of the proprieties and one who deserved no better than the companionship of the pickpockets of Newgate Prison.
Even then Defoe was fortunate that he had never extended his travels beyond the confines of the British Isles. For intolerance having been driven from the mother country had found a most welcome refuge in certain of the colonies on the other side of the ocean. And this was due not so much to the character of the people who had moved into these recently discovered regions as to the fact that the new world offered infinitely greater economic advantages than the old one.
In England itself, a small island so densely populated that it offered standing room only to the majority of her people, all business would soon have come to an end if the people had not been willing to practice the ancient and honorable rule of “give and take.” But in America, a country of unknown extent and unbelievable riches, a continent inhabited by a mere handful of farmers and workmen, no such compromise was necessary.
And so it happened that a small communist settlement on the shores of Massachusetts Bay could develop into such a stronghold of self-righteous orthodoxy that the like of it had not been seen since the happy days when Calvin exercised the functions of Chief of Police and Lord High Executioner in western Switzerland.
The credit for the first permanent settlement in the chilly regions of the Charles River usually goes to a small group of people who are referred to as the Pilgrim Fathers. A Pilgrim, in the usual sense of the word, is one who “journeys to a sacred place as an act of religious devotion.” The passengers of the Mayflower were not pilgrims in that sense of the word. They were English bricklayers and tailors and cord-wainers and blacksmiths and wheelwrights who had left their country to escape certain of those hated “poperies” which continued to cling to the worship in most of the churches around them.
First they had crossed the North Sea and had gone to Holland where they arrived at a moment of great economic depression. Our school-books continue to ascribe their desire for further travel to their unwillingness to let their children learn the Dutch language and otherwise to see them absorbed by the country of their adoption. It seems very unlikely, however, that those simple folk were guilty of such shocking ingratitude and purposely followed a most reprehensible course of hyphenation. The truth is that most of the time they were forced to live in the slums, that they found it very difficult to make a living in an already over-populated country, and that they expected a better revenue from tobacco planting in America than from wool-carding in Leiden. Hence to Virginia they sailed, but having been thrown by adverse currents and bad seamanship upon the shores of Massachusetts, they decided to stay where they were rather than risk the horrors of another voyage in their leaky tub.