From Virginia's “ACT for Establishing Religious Freedom.” 1785.
Forcing him [a man] to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor whose morals he would make his pattern, . . . and is withdrawing from the ministry those temporal rewards which . . . are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labors for the instruction of mankind.
Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, more than our opinions in physics or geometry.
Therefore, the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to the offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which in common with his fellow-citizens he has a natural right.
It tends also to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing, with a monopoly of worldly honors and emoluments, those who will externally profess and conform to it.
