And yet such abuses of power have been staining and darkening all the
ages of human administration, and, unfortunately, among professing
Christians as well as among pagans and Jews. Intolerance is so rooted
in the selfishness and ambition of human nature that it has ever been
one of the most difficult of practical problems to curb and regulate
it. Those who have most complained of it whilst feeling it, often only
needed to have the circumstances reversed in order to fall into
similar wickedness. The Puritans, who fled from it as from the Dragon
himself, soon had their Star-Chamber too, their whipping-posts, their
death-scaffolds, and their sentences of exile for those who dissented
from their orthodoxy and their order. Even infidelity and atheism,
always the most blatant for freedom when in the minority, have shown
in the philosophy of Hobbes and in the Reign of Terror in France that
they are as liable to be intolerant, fanatical, and oppressive when
they have the mastery as the strongest faith and the most assured
religionism. And the Quakers themselves, who make freedom of
conscience one of the chief corner-stones of their religion, have not
always been free from offensive and disorderly aggressions upon the
rightful sphere of government and the rightful religious freedom of
other worshipers. Even so treacherous is the human heart on the
subject of just and equal religious toleration.