With eyes apparently fixed on a small gable window in the front church wall, through which a beam of sunlight made a slanting bar of silver he began his sermon:
“When a stranger far out in the Valley of Virginia sees this church he is struck by its location and impressed by its look of age and permanence. He asks its history and is told: ‘It is the Jackson River Meeting House, built by Dissenters, Presbyterians, who came to this wild land from far Scotland and Ireland, counting the cost and danger nothing, if they might but find a place to worship God as conscience told them God should be worshipped. But they have found that even the groves of the wilderness are not God’s free and holy temples.’
“Christ’s mission was to wipe out persecution, to tear out the partitions of prejudice in his kingdom, to establish a universal faith; yet history shows that persecution, the murderous offspring of prejudice, remains; that all that is necessary to unleash it, start the rack creaking and the stake burning is a minor doctrinal divergence; it may be as to the form of baptism, belief in trans-substantiation or predestination.
“Churchmen clothed with a little brief authority become venomously intolerant; instigate the sovereign to acts of oppression, particularly against kindred sects; against other spiritual warriors serving under the banner of the cross; leading lives much as theirs were before [pg 99] they occupied the seats of the mighty and struggling as they once did against religious intolerance. The commission, ‘Go ye into all the world,’ is neglected and the torch of evangelism kindled in the white flame of sacrifice to light the way, is perverted to light the pyre of martyrdom of believers, as they, that the Son of God was crucified that Jew and Gentile, Greek and barbarian might live.
“During the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, at the very time Columbus financed by them was cruising unknown seas and finding a new world, Torquemada, a Spanish monk, having shown special aptitude for persecution was raised to Inquisitor General; and carried on against the Jews the greatest religious persecution that as yet has disgraced a world drenched scarlet by persecutions; which did not end until 8,000 had been burned at the stake, 90,000 had been imprisoned for life and 800,000 had been expelled from Spain.
“In your prejudice you say: ‘But Spain is a Catholic country.’ Do not the Catholics believe that there is a God who made heaven and earth, the sea and all that in them is; and that there is a Christ who made atonement for the sins of the world? And what more believe you? And are not they as charitable as you?
“Has Protestant America clean hands? The New World’s record of persecution, opportunity and environment considered, is no cleaner than that of the Old. The Pilgrim fathers coming to America, seeking religious freedom, brought with them their prejudices. The churchman of the Old World brought his doctrinal issues to the New, as the caravan camel under his burden of ivory and dates and spices, carries his hump. He was no sooner established by the finding of shelter for his goods and chattels than unloading the pack he exhibited the [pg 100] old hump, declaring that God should only hear prayers of repentance and praise in his particular church.
“Our age of greater freedom and new thought demands a severance of church and state; but our colonial government, assuming to know and prescribing as physician its only remedy for a sick soul and a contrite heart, commands that the penitent shall only offer prayers and God shall only answer, if they are offered within the walls of the Church of England.
“Human laws cannot control men in their attitude of mind and heart towards God; the state cannot compel uniform prayers and hours of prayer; and faith is an issue between God and the individual. Coercion makes opinion stronger and constraint makes hypocrites, not converts.
“Again history demonstrates that the persecutor accomplishes nothing except his own undoing; while the persecuted one, if an advocate of a great truth, grows to greater things. By persecution faith grows; it lifts the vail for the persecuted one and he sees into the Holy of Holies.