TOLERATION, in matters of religion, is either civil or ecclesiastical. Civil toleration is an impunity and safety granted by the state to every sect that does not maintain doctrines inconsistent with the public peace; and ecclesiastical toleration is the allowance which the church grants to its members to differ in certain opinions not reputed fundamental.

As the gods of paganism were almost all local and tutelary, and as it was a maxim universally received that it was the duty of every man to worship, together with his own deities, the tutelary gods of the country in which he might chance to reside, there was no room for persecution in the heathen world, on account of different sentiments in religion, or of the different rites with which the various deities were worshipped. Had the primitive Christians joined their fellow-citizens in the worship of Jupiter, Juno, and the rest of the rabble of Roman divinities, they would have been suffered to worship, without molestation, the Creator of the world and the Redeemer of mankind; for in that case the God of the Christians would have been looked upon as a being of the same kind with the gods of the empire, and the great principle of intercommunity would have remained unviolated. But the true God had expressly prohibited both Jews and Christians from worshipping any other god besides Himself; and it was their refusal to break that precept of their religion which made their heathen masters look upon them as atheists, and persecute them as a people inimical to the state. Utility, and not truth, was the object for which the heathen legislatures supported the national religion. They well knew that the stories told by their poets, of their different divinities, of the rewards of Elysium, and of the punishments of Tartarus, were a collection of senseless fables; but they had nothing better to propose to the vulgar, and they were not such strangers to the human heart as to suppose that mankind could live together in society without being influenced in their conduct by some religion.

Widely different from the genius of paganism was the spirit of the Jewish dispensation. Truth, which is in fact always coincident with great utility, was the great object of the Mosaic law. The children of Israel were separated from the rest of the world, to preserve the know ledge and worship of the true God, at a time when all the other nations on earth, forgetting the Lord that made them, were falling prostrate to stocks and stones, and worshipping devils and impure spirits. Such was the contagion of idolatry, and so strong the propensity of the Israelites to the customs and manners of the Egyptians, and other polytheistic nations around them, that the purpose of their separation could not have been served, had not Jehovah condescended to become not only their tutelary God, but even their supreme civil magistrate; so that under the Mosaic economy, idolatry was the crime of high treason, and as such justly punished by the laws of the state. Among the Jews, the church and state were not indeed different societies. They were so thoroughly incorporated, that what was a sin in the one was a crime in the other; and the forfeiture of ecclesiastical privileges was the forfeiture of the rights of citizens.

In many respects the Christian religion is directly opposite to the ritual law of Moses. It is calculated for all, and intended to be propagated among all nations. Instead of separating one people from another, one of its principal objects is to disseminate universal benevolence, and to inculcate upon the whole human race that mutual love which naturally springs from the knowledge that all men are brethren. Its ultimate end being to train its votaries for heaven, it concerns itself no further with the affairs of earth than to enforce by eternal sanctions the laws of morality; and the kingdom of its Founder not being of this world, it leaves every nation at liberty to fabricate its own municipal laws, so as best to serve its own interest in the various circumstances in which it may be placed; and denounces a [7:21:323]curse upon all who pay not to those laws the fullest obedience, when they are not obviously inconsistent with the laws of piety and virtue, which are of prior obligation. The Christian church therefore must always remain a society distinct from the stale; and though, till the present age of hazardous innovations, it has been deemed expedient in every country where the truth of the gospel is admitted, to give to the religion of Christ a legal establishment, and to confer immunities on its ministers, this measure has been adopted, not to secure the purity of the faith, which appeals to the private judgment of each individual, but merely to preserve the peace of society, and to impose a restraint upon those actions of which human laws cannot take cognizance. With religion, Christian governments have no further concern than as it tends to promote the practice of virtue. The early Christians, however, not understanding the principle upon which penal laws were employed to preserve the purity of the Jewish religion, and, as our blessed Lord observed to two of his apostles, not knowing what spirit they were of, hastily concluded that they had a right to enforce the doctrines and worship of the New Testament, by the same means which had been used to preserve the Israelites steady to the doctrines and worship of the Old. Hence, though they had themselves suffered the most cruel persecutions, they no sooner had the power of the state in their bands, than they persecuted the pagans for their idolatry; and afterwards, when heresies arose in the church, persecuted one another for expressing in different phrases metaphysical propositions, of such a nature as no human mind can fully comprehend. The apostle had forewarned them that there must be heresies in the church, that they who are approved may be made manifest; but it did not occur to them that persecution for opinion is the worst of all heresies, as it violates at once truth and charity.

Hitherto these unhallowed means of bringing Christians to uniformity of faith and practice, had been only occasionally employed, from their not accurately distinguishing between the spirit of the gospel and that of the law; but as soon as the bishops of Rome had brought the inhabitants of Europe to recognise their infallibility in explaining articles of faith and deciding points of controversy, persecution became a regular and permanent instrument of ecclesiastical discipline. To doubt or to deny any doctrine to which these unerring instructors had given the sanction of their approbation, was held to be not only a resisting of the truth, but an act of rebellion against their sacred authority; and the secular power, of which by various arts, they hail acquired the absolute direction, was instantly employed to avenge both.

Thus Europe had been accustomed, during many centuries, to see speculative opinions propagated or defended by force; the charity and mutual forbearance which Christianity recommends with so much warmth were forgotten; the sacred rights of conscience and of private judgment were unheard of; and not only the idea of toleration, but even the word itself, in the sense now affixed to it, was unknown. A right to extirpate error by force was universally allowed to be the prerogative of those who possessed the knowledge of truth; and though the first reformers did not arrogate to themselves in direct terms that infallibility which they had refused to the church of Rome, they were not less confident of the truth of their own doctrines, and required with equal ardour the princes of their party to check such as presumed to impugn or to oppose them. To this request too many of those princes lent a willing car. It flattered at once their piety and their pride, to be considered as possessing all the rights of Jewish princes; and Ηenry the Eighth of England, after labouring to make his divines declare that all authority, ecclesiastical as well as civil, flows from the crown, persecuted alternately the Papists and Protestants. Many of his successors, whose characters were much better than his, thought themselves duly authorized, by virtue of their acknowledged supremacy over all states and conditions of men, to enforce by means of penal laws a uniformity of faith and worship among their subjects; and it was not till the revolution that any sect in England seems to have fully understood, that all men have an unalienable right to worship God in the manner which to them may seem most suitable to his nature, and the relation in which they stand to him; or that it is impossible to pr<κluce uniformity of opinion by any other means than candid disquisition and sound reasoning. That the civil magistrate has a right to check the propagation of opinions which tend only to sap the foundations of virtue, and to disturb the peace of society, cannot, we think, be questioned; but that he has no right to restrain mankind from publicly professing any system of faith which comprehends the being and providence of God, the great laws of morality, and a future state of rewards and punishments, is as evident as that it is the object of religion to fit mankind for heaven, and the whole duty of the magistrates to maintain peace, liberty, and property, upon earth. We have elsewhere observed, that among a number of different sects of Christians, it is not the superior purity of the system of faith professed by one of them, that gives it a right to the immunities of an establishment in preference to all its rivals; but though the legislature is authorized, in certain circumstances, to make a less pure system the religion of the state, it would be the height of absurdity to suppose that any man, or body of men, can have authority to prevent a purer system from being acknowledged as the religion of individuals. For propagating opinions and pursuing practices which necessarily create civil disturbance, every man is answerable to the laws of his country; but for the soundness of his faith, and the purity of his worship, he is answerable to no tribunal but that which can search the heart.

When churches are established, and creeds drawn up as guides to the preaching of the national clergy, it is obvious that every clergyman who teaches any thing directly contrary to the doctrine of such creeds, violates the condition on which he holds his benefice, and may be justly deprived of that benefice, whether his obnoxious opinion be in itself true or false, important or unimportant; but his punishment should be extended no farther. To expel a Christian from private communion for teaching any doctrine which is neither injurious to the state nor contrary to the few simple articles which comprise the sum of the Christian faith, is the grossest tyranny; and the governors of that church which is guilty of it usurp the prerogative of the blessed Lord, who commanded the apostles themselves not to be called masters in this sense; for one, says he, is your master, even Christ. It is indeed a hardship to deprive a man of' his living for conscientiously illustrating what he believes to be a truth of the gospel, only because his illustration may be different from that which had formerly been given by men fallible like himself; but if the establishment of human compilations of faith be necessary, this hardship cannot be removed but by making such compilations as simple as possible, and drawing them up in scripture language. Such a reformation, could it be effected peaceably, would serve other good purposes; for while it would sufficiently guard the purity of the faith, it would withdraw that temptation which too many establishments throw in the way of men to subscribe to the truth of what they do not really believe; and it would effectually banish from the Christian church every thing which can be called by the name of persecution.