conscience, the voluntary maintenance of worship, and the separation of
church and state.

After the Restoration, and again after the enthronement of William and
Mary, it became a serious practical problem to establish satisfactory
relations between the various sects. All who were not sectarian fanatics
saw that some kind of compromise was desirable, and the more liberal wished
to include all but the most extreme phases of belief within the national
church. When that national church was finally established on the lines
which it has since retained, and numerous bodies of dissenters found
themselves compelled to remain outside, toleration became more and more
essential, in order that the nation might live at peace with itself. From
generation to generation the dissenters were able to secure for themselves
a larger recognition, disabilities were removed as men of all sects saw
that restrictions were useless, and toleration became the established law
in the relations of the various religious bodies to each other.

[Sidenote: Arminianism.]

The conditions which led to toleration also developed a liberal
interpretation of the relations of the church to the people, a broader
explanation of doctrines, and a rational insight into the problems of the
religious life. One phase of this more comprehensive religious spirit was
shown in Arminianism, which was nothing more than an assertion of
individualism in the sphere of man's relations to God. Calvinism maintained
that man cannot act freely for himself, that he is strictly under the
sovereignty of the Divine Will. The democratic tendency in Holland, where
Arminianism had its origin, expressed itself in the declaration that every
man is free to accept or to reject religious truth, that the will is
individual and self-assertive, and that the conscience is not bound.