ss liberty of conscience were recognized,[90] and at the close he
solemnly promised for himself and his heirs that the recognition of this
liberty, which he had declared, should remain forever inviolable and
that the wording of the article should not be changed in any
particular.[91] The constitutional principle was thus given at once the
force of a _lex in perpetuum valitura_.

In 1692 Massachusetts received a charter from William III. in which,
following the example of the Toleration Act of 1689, full liberty was
granted to all Christians except Catholics;[92] and Georgia was given a
similar law in 1732 by George II.[93]

Thus the principles of religious liberty to a greater or less extent
acquired constitutional recognition in America. In the closest
connection with the great religious political movement out of which the
American democracy was born, there arose the conviction that there
exists a right not conferred upon the citizen but inherent in man, that
acts of conscience and expressions of religious conviction stand
inviolable over against the state as the exercise of a higher right.
This right so long suppressed is no "inheritance", is nothing handed
down from their fathers, as the rights and liberties of Magna Charta and
of the other English enactments,--not the State but the Gospel
proclaimed it.

What in Europe at that time and even much later had received official
expression only in scanty rudiments,[94] and aside from that was only
asserted in the literature of the great intellectual movement which
began in the seventeenth century and reached its height in the
clearing-up epoch of the century following, was in Rhode Island and
other colonies a recognized principle of the state by the middle of the
seventeenth century. The right of the liberty of conscience was
proclaimed, and with it came the conception of a universal right of
man. In 1776 this right was designated by all the bills of rights,
mostly in emphatic form and with precedence over all others, as a
natural and inherent right.[95]

The character of this right is emphasized by the bill of rights of New
Hampshire, which declares that among the natural rights some are
inalienable because no one can offer an equivalent for them. Such are
the rights of conscience.[96]

The idea of legally establishing inalienable, inherent and sacred rights
of the individual is not of political but religious origin. What has
been held to be a work of the Revolutio