[pg 134] Three Baptist preachers, James Chiles, John Waller and Lewis Craig, were arrested; but were offered their release if they would discontinue preaching. They declined. As they were being carried to prison through the streets of Fredericksburg they sang: “Broad is the way that leads to death;” and while confined, preached to the people who congregated beneath the windows of the jail.
They were arraigned for “preaching the gospel contrary to law.” Patrick Henry, when he heard the charge arose and said: “What do I hear read? Did I hear an expression that these men whom Your Worships are about to try for misdemeanor are charged with preaching the Gospel of the Son of God?”
The result of these persecutions made the conformist clergy yet more unpopular; more of the people became non-conformists, until they numerically exceeded the conformists. Then the non-conformists assumed the role of aggressor; objected to the term dissenter, demanded the repeal of all acts of toleration, religious freedom for all and that the clergy of no sect be paid by general taxation.
Tory influence dominated the conformist clergy; the non-conformist preachers, advocating religious liberty, quite naturally became the first advocates of civil liberty and freedom for the colonies. Thus in the issue that brought about the Revolution, one side of the religious controversialists favored the colony, the other the king; and by the end of the struggle the conformist or English Church was practically non-existent.
Rev. Donald McDonald, going to Williamsburg in the spring of 1772 to lobby against the Bill, “To Regulate His Majesty’s Protestant Subjects,” was forced to remain indefinitely. Of necessity he gave up his church in [pg 135] the valley; and in order to make a living, accepted the call of a small church in Williamsburg.
Here he made the acquaintance of and was vastly aided in his fight for religious freedom by Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, Richard Henry Lee and Edmund Pendleton; three of whom were members and vestrymen of the English Church. Each being members of the Upper House of Assembly bore the title of Esquire, which, though now used indiscriminately, was then a title of great respect.
In the old Bruton Church of Williamsburg, a commemorative tablet is inscribed: “To the glory of God and in memory of the members of the committee which drafted the law establishing religious freedom in Virginia; Thomas Jefferson, vestryman of St. Ann’s Parish; Edmund Pendleton, vestryman of Drysdale Parish; George Wyth, vestryman of Bruton Parish; George Mason, vestryman of Truro Parish; Thomas Ludwell Lee, vestryman of Overwharton Parish; being all members of the committee.”
It was George Mason of Gunston Hall, vestryman of Truro Parish, who wrote the Virginia Bill of Rights; and it was copied by Jefferson in preparing the Declaration of Independence.
In the Virginia Bill of Rights it is declared: “That religion is the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it can be directed only by reason and conviction, nor by force or violence; and therefore that all men should enjoy the fullest toleration in the exercise of religion according to the dictates of conscience, unpunished and unrestrained by the magistrate.”
Jefferson has come down as “The father of modern democracy and religious toleration.” It was his bill establishing [pg 136] religious freedom, beginning: “Well aware that Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishment or burdens or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness * * *” that Virginia in territory, then an empire, established perfect religious freedom.