questions of discipline and self-regulation rather than by dogma.
The sectaries cherished no purpose or prospect of prevailing over
the nations; and they were concerned with the individual more
than with the congregation, with conventicles, not with State
churches. Their view was narrowed, but their sight was
sharpened. It appeared to them that governments and institutions
are made to pass away, like things of earth, whilst souls are
immortal; that there is no more proportion between liberty and
power than between eternity and time; that, therefore, the sphere
of enforced command ought to be restricted within fixed limits,
and that which had been done by authority, and outward discipline,
and organised violence, should be attempted by division of power,
and committed to the intellect and the conscience of free men #32.
Thus was exchanged the dominion of will over will for the dominion
of reason over reason. The true apostles of toleration are not
those who sought protection for their own beliefs, or who had none
to protect; but men to whom, irrespective of their cause, it was
a political, a moral, and a theological dogma, a question of
conscience involving both religion and policy #33. Such a man was
Socinus; and others arose in the smaller sects--the Independent
founder of the colony of Rhode Island, and the Quaker patriarch
of Pennsylvania. Much of the energy and zeal which had laboured
for authority of doctrine was employed for liberty of prophesying.
The air was filled with the enthusiasm of a new cry; but the cause
was still the same. It became a boast that religion was the
mother of freedom, that freedom was the lawful offspring of religion;
and this transmutation, this subversion of established forms of
political life by the development of religious thought, brings us
to the heart of my subject, to the significant and central feature of
the historic cycles before us. Beginning with the strongest