er, "if
this liberty of worship is accorded, experience teaches us every day that
diversity of religion is not the cause of the ruin of states, and that a
government does not cease to be good, nor its subjects to live in peace
and friend ship with one another, rendering due obedience to the laws and
to their rulers as well as if they had all been of the same religion,
without having another thought, save for the preservation of the dignity
and grandeur of the state in which God had caused them to be born. The
danger is not in the permission, but in the prohibition of religious
liberty."

All this seems commonplace enough to us on the western side of the
Atlantic, in the middle of the nineteenth century, but it would have been
rank blasphemy in New England in the middle of the seventeenth, many
years after Jeannin spoke. It was a horrible sound, too, in the ears of
some of his audience.

To the pretence so often urged by the Catholic persecutors, and now set
up by their Calvinistic imitators; that those who still clung to the old
religion were at liberty to depart from the land, the president replied
with dignified scorn.

"With what justice," he asked, "can you drive into, exile people who have
committed no offence, and who have helped to conquer the very country
from which you would now banish them? If you do drive them away, you will
make solitudes in your commonwealth, which will, be the cause of evils
such as I prefer that you should reflect upon without my declaring them
now. Although these reasons," he continued, "would seem sufficient to
induce you to accord the free and public exercise of the Catholic
religion, the king, not hoping as much as that, because aware that you
are not disposed to go so far, is content to request only this grace in
behalf of the Catholics, that you will tolerate them, and suffer them to
have some exercise of their religion within their own households, without
interference or inquiry on that account, and without execution of the
rigorous decrees heretofore enforced against them."

Certainly if such wholesome, moderate, and modest counsels as these had
been rejected, it would have been sound doctrine to proclaim that the
world did not move. And there were individuals enough, even an
influential party, prepared to oppose them for both technical and
practical reasons. And the cause of intolerance derived much warmth and
comfort at this juncture from that great luminary of theology and