own house to kneel, stand, sit, or use any other posture; and to
clothe himself in white or black, in short or in long garments? Let it
not be made unlawful to eat bread, drink wine, or wash with water in
the church. In a word, whatsoever things are left free by law in the
common occasions of life, let them remain free unto every Church in
divine worship. Let no man's life, or body, or house, or estate,
suffer any manner of prejudice upon these accounts. Can you allow of
the Presbyterian discipline? Why should not the Episcopal also have
what they like? Ecclesiastical authority, whether it be administered
by the hands of a single person or many, is everywhere the same; and
neither has any jurisdiction in things civil, nor any manner of
power of compulsion, nor anything at all to do with riches and
revenues.

  Ecclesiastical assemblies and sermons are justified by daily
experience and public allowance. These are allowed to people of some
one persuasion; why not to all? If anything pass in a religious
meeting seditiously and contrary to the public peace, it is to be
punished in the same manner and no otherwise than as if it had
happened in a fair or market. These meetings ought not to be
sanctuaries for factious and flagitious fellows. Nor ought it to be
less lawful for men to meet in churches than in halls; nor are one
part of the subjects to be esteemed more blamable for their meeting
together than others. Every one is to be accountable for his own
actions, and no man is to be laid under a suspicion or odium for the
fault of another. Those that are seditious, murderers, thieves,
robbers, adulterers, slanderers, etc., of whatsoever Church, whether
national or not, ought to be punished and suppressed. But those
whose doctrine is peaceable and whose manners are pure and blameless
ought to be upon equal terms with their fellow-subjects. Thus if
solemn assemblies, observations of festivals, public worship be
permitted to any one sort of professors, all these things ought to
be permitted to the Presbyterians, Independents, Anabaptists,
Arminians, Quakers, and others, with the same liberty. Nay, if we
may openly speak the truth, and as becomes one man to another, neither
Pagan nor Mahometan, nor Jew, ought to be excluded from the civil
rights of the commonwealth because of his religion. The Gospel
commands no such thing. The Church which "judgeth not those that are
without"* wants it not. And the commonwealth, which embraces
indifferently all men that are honest, peaceable, and industrious,
requires it not. Shall we suffer a Pagan to deal and trade with us,
and shall we not suffer him to pray unto and worship God? If we
allow the Jews to have private houses and dwellings amongst us, why
should we not allow them to have synagogues? Is their doctrine more
false, their worship more abominable, or is the civil peace more
endangered by their meeting in public than in their private houses?
But if these things may be granted to Jews and Pagans, surely the
condition of any Christians ought not to be worse than theirs in a
Christian commonwealth.

  * I Cor. 5. 12, 13.

  You will say, perhaps: "Yes, it ought to be; because they are more
inclinable to factions, tumults, and civil wars." I answer: Is this
the fault of the Christian religion? If it be so, truly the
Christian religion is the worst of all religions and ought neither
to be embraced by any particular person, nor tolerated by any
commonwealth. For if this be the genius, this the nature of the
Christian religion, to be turbulent and destructive to the civil
peace, that Church itself which the magistrate indulges will not
always be innocent. But far be it from us to say any such thing of
that religion which carries the greatest opposition to covetousness,
ambition, discord, contention, and all manner of inordinate desires,
and is the most modest and peaceable religion that ever was. We
must, therefore, seek another cause of those evils that are charged
upon religion. And, if we consider right, we shall find it to
consist wholly in the subject that I am treating of. It is not the
diversity of opinions (which cannot be avoided), but the refusal of
toleration to those that are of different opinions (which might have
been granted), that has produced all the bustles and wars that have
been in the Christian world upon account of religion. The heads and
leaders of the Church, moved by avarice and insatiable desire of
dominion, making use of the immoderate ambition of magistrates and the
credulous superstition of the giddy multitude, have incensed and
animated them against those that dissent from themselves, by preaching
unto them, contrary to the laws of the Gospel and to the precepts of
charity, that schismatics and heretics are to be outed of their
possessions and destroyed. And thus have they mixed together and
confounded two things that are in themselves most different, the
Church and the commonwealth. Now as it is very difficult for men
patiently to suffer themselves to be stripped of the goods which
they have got by their honest industry, and, contrary to all the
laws of equity, both human and divine, to be delivered up for a prey
to other men's violence and rapine; especially when they are otherwise
altogether blameless; and that the occasion for which they are thus
treated does not at all belong to the jurisdiction of the
magistrate, but entirely to the conscience of every particular man for
the conduct of which he is accountable to God only; what else can be
expected but that these men, growing weary of the evils under which
they labour, should in the end think it lawful for them to resist
force with force, and to defend their natural rights (which are not
forfeitable upon account of religion) with arms as well as they can?
That this has been hitherto the ordinary course of things is
abundantly evident in history, and that it will continue to be so
hereafter is but too apparent in reason. It cannot indeed, be
otherwise so long as the principle of persecution for religion shall
prevail, as it has done hitherto, with magistrate and people, and so
long as those that ought to be the preachers of peace and concord
shall continue with all their art and strength to excite men to arms
and sound the trumpet of war. But that magistrates should thus