he full benefit of
the Act without signing one of the thirty-nine Articles. An Independent
minister, who is perfectly willing to make the declaration required
from the Quaker, but who has doubts about six or seven of the Articles,
remains still subject to the penal laws. Howe is liable to punishment if
he preaches before he has solemnly declared his assent to the Anglican
doctrine touching the Eucharist. Penn, who altogether rejects
the Eucharist, is at perfect liberty to preach without making any
declaration whatever on the subject.

These are some of the obvious faults which must strike every person who
examines the Toleration Act by that standard of just reason which is the
same in all countries and in all ages. But these very faults may perhaps
appear to be merits, when we take into consideration the passions and
prejudices of those for whom the Toleration Act was framed. This
law, abounding with contradictions which every smatterer in political
philosophy can detect, did what a law framed by the utmost skill of the
greatest masters of political philosophy might have failed to do. That
the provisions which have been recapitulated are cumbrous, puerile,
inconsistent with each other, inconsistent with the true theory of
religious liberty, must be acknowledged. All that can be said in their
defence is this; that they removed a vast mass of evil without shocking
a vast mass of prejudice; that they put an end, at once and for ever,
without one division in either House of Parliament, without one riot in
the streets, with scarcely one audible murmur even from the classes most
deeply tainted with bigotry, to a persecution which had raged during
four generations, which had broken innumerable hearts, which had made
innumerable firesides desolate, which had filled the prisons with men
of whom the world was not worthy, which had driven thousands of those
honest, diligent and godfearing yeomen and artisans, who are the true
strength of a nation, to seek a refuge beyond the ocean among the
wigwams of red Indians and the lairs of panthers. Such a defence,
however weak it may appear to some shallow speculators, will probably be
thought complete by statesmen.

The English, in 1689, were by no means disposed to admit the doctrine
that religious error ought to be left unpunished. That doctrine was just
then more unpopular than it had ever been. For it had, only a few months
before, been hypocritically put forward as a pretext for per