until he had himself under control, "I think we all remember what
it is to be persecuted for religion's sake. Long before we came
together in Spottsylvania County, Virginia, and organized ourselves
into a church and travelled as a church over the mountains into
this wilderness, worshipping by the way, we knew what it was to be
persecuted. Some of us were sent to jail for preaching the Gospel
and kept there; we preached to the people through the bars of our
dungeons. Mobs were collected outside to drown our voices; we
preached the louder and some jeered, but some felt sorry and began
to serve God. They burned matches and pods of red pepper to choke
us; they hired strolls to beat drums that we might not be heard for
the din. Some of us knew what it was to have live snakes thrown
into our assemblages while at worship; or nests of live hornets. Or
to have a crowd rush into the church with farming tools and whips
and clubs. Or to see a gun levelled at one of us in the pulpit, and
to be dispersed with firearms. Harder than any of these things to
stand, we have known what it is to be slandered. But no single man
of us, thank God, ever stopped for these things or for anything.

Thirty years and more this lasted, until we and all such as we
found a friend in Patrick Henry. Now, we hear that by statute all
religious believers in Virginia have been made equal as respects
the rights and favors of the law.

"But you know it was partly to escape intolerable tyranny that we
left our mother country and travelled a path paved with suffering
and lined with death into this wilderness. For in this virgin land
we thought we should be free to worship God according to our
consciences."