follow the religion of the strong?

"As for the perils which some affect to fear," said Jeannin, further, "if
this liberty of worship is accorded, experience teaches us every day that
diversity of religion is not the cause of the ruin of states, and that a
government does not cease to be good, nor its subjects to live in peace
and friend ship with one another, rendering due obedience to the laws and
to their, rulers as well as if they had all been of the same religion,
without having another thought, save for the preservation of the dignity
and grandeur of the state in which God had caused them to be born. The
danger is not in the permission, but in the prohibition of religious
liberty."

All this seems commonplace enough to us on the western side of the
Atlantic, in the middle of the nineteenth century, but it would have been
rank blasphemy in New England in the middle of the seventeenth, many
years after Jeannin spoke. It was a horrible sound, too, in the ears of
some of his audience.

To the pretence so often urged by the Catholic persecutors, and now set
up by their Calvinistic imitators; that those who still clung to the old
religion were at liberty to depart from the land, the president replied
with dignified scorn.

"With what justice," he asked, "can you drive into, exile people who have
committed no offence, and who have helped to conquer the very country
from which you would now banish them? If you do drive them away, you
will make solitudes in your commonwealth, which will, be the cause of
evils such as I prefer that you should reflect upon without my declaring
them now. Although these reasons," he continued, "would seem sufficient