What They Say | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Jul 3, 1907

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 33, No. 27.

What They Say.

When religionists in America are beginning to talk of tolerating or not tolerating those who do not agree with them, it is well to recall just what the original American principle is. Here are a few excerpts worth reading:—

There is a very great difference between toleration and liberty. Toleration is a concession which may be withdrawn. It implies a preference for the ruling form of faith and worship, and a practical disapproval of all other forms.—Schaff's Church and State in the United States, p. 14.

The free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience, is something which every man may indeed demand as a right, not something for which we must ask a privilege. To grant to the State the power of tolerating is implicitly to grant to it the power of prohibiting.—Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography, vol. 4, p. 165.

Toleration denotes neither the freedom from State control nor the equality of all religions before the law. Toleration is the allowance of

that which is not wholly approved. Religious liberty, on the other hand, is absolute freedom of religious opinion and worship.—Thompson's Church and State in the United States, p. 12.

What other nations call toleration we call religious rights. They are not exercised in virtue of governmental indulgence but as rights, of which government can not deprive any portion of citizens however small. Despotic power may invade those rights, but justice still confirms them.—U. S. Senate Report, 1829.

The framers of the U. S. Constitution recognized the eternal principle that man's relation with his God is above human legislation, and his rights of conscience inalienable. Reason was not necessary to establish this truth; we are conscious of it in our own bosoms. It is this conscientiousness which, in defiance of human laws, has sustained so many martyrs in tortures and in flames. They felt that their duty to God was superior to human enactments, and that man could exercise no authority over their consciences. It is an inborn principle which nothing can eradicate. The bigot, in the pride of his authority, may lose sight of it; but strip him of his power, prescribe a faith to him which his conscience rejects, threaten him in turn with the dungeon and the fagot, and the spirit which God has implanted in him rises up in rebellion and defies you.—U. S. Senate Report, 1829.