faith in advancing them,
had charged the jury that it could pass on the latter but not the
former, this caution did not avail with the Court, which contrived on
another ground ultimately to upset the verdict of "guilty." The late
Chief Justice Stone, speaking for himself and Justices Roberts and
Frankfurter, dissented: "I cannot say that freedom of thought and
worship includes freedom to procure money by making knowingly false
statements about one's religious experiences."[48]

FREE EXERCISE OF RELIGION: STATE AND LOCAL RESTRAINTS

The Mormon Church cases were decided prior to the emergence of the clear
and present danger doctrine dealt with below. In its consideration of
cases stemming from State and local legislation the Court has endeavored
at times to take account of this doctrine, with the result that its
decisions have followed a somewhat erratic course. The leading case is
Cantwell _v._ Connecticut.[49] Here three members of the sect calling
itself Jehovah's Witnesses were convicted under a statute which forbade
the unlicensed soliciting of funds on the representation that they were
for religious or charitable purposes, and also on a general charge of
breach of the peace by accosting in a strongly Catholic neighborhood two
communicants of that faith and playing to them a phonograph record which
grossly insulted the Christian religion in general and the Catholic
church in particular. Both convictions were held to violate the
constitutional guarantees of speech and religion, the clear and present
danger rule being invoked in partial justification of the holding,
although it is reasonably inferable from the Court's own recital of the
facts that the listeners to the phonograph record exhibited a degree of
self-restraint rather unusual under the circumstances. Two weeks later
the Court, as if to "compensate" for its zeal in the Cantwell Case, went
to the other extreme, and urging the maxim that legislative acts must be
presumed to be constitutional, sustained the State of Pennsylvania in
excluding from its schools children of the Jehovah's Witnesses, who in
the name of their beliefs refused to salute the flag.[50] The subsequent
record of the Court's holdings in this field is somewhat variable. A
decision in June, 1942, sustaining the application to vendors of
religious books and pamphlets of a nondiscriminatory license fee[51] was
eleven months later vacated and formally reversed;[52] shortly
thereafter a like fa