It is therefore a matter of everlasting gratitude and thanksgiving
that all the men most concerned in the founding of our commonwealth
were so clear and well-balanced on the subject of religious liberty,
and so thoroughly inwove the same into its organic constitution.
Gustavus Adolphus and Axel Oxenstiern were the heroes of their time in
the cause of religious liberty in continental Europe. Though intensely
troubled in their administration by the Roman Catholics and the
Anabaptists, the most intolerant of intolerants in those days, they
never opposed force against the beliefs or worships of either; and
when force was used against the papal powers, it was only so far as to
preserve unto themselves and their fellow-confessors the inalienable
right to worship God according to the dictates of their own
consciences without molestation or disturbance. In their scheme of
colonization in this Western World, first and last, the invitation was
to all classes of Christians in suffering and persecution for
conscience' sake, who were favorable to a free state where they could
have the free enjoyment of their property and religion, to cast in
their lot. In the first charter, confirmed by all the authorities of
the kingdom and rehearsed in the instructions given by the throne for
the execution of the intention, special provision was made for the
protection of the convictions and worship of those not of the same
confession with that for which the government provided. Though a
Lutheran colony, under a Lutheran king, sustained and protected by a
Lutheran government, the Calvinists had place and equal protection in
it from the very beginning; and when the Quakers came, they were at
once and as freely welcomed on the same free principles, as also the
representatives of the Church of England.
As to William Penn, though contemplating above all the well-being and
furtherance of the particular Society of which he was an eminent
ornament and preacher, consistency with himself, as well as the
established situation of affairs, demanded of him the free toleration
of the Church, however unpalatable to his Society, and with it of all
religious sects and orders of worship. From his prison at Newgate he
had written that the enaction of laws restraining persons from the
free exercise of their consciences in matters of religion was but "the
knotting of whipcord on the part of the enactors to lash their own
posterity, whom they could never promise to be conformed for ages to
come to a national religion." Again and again had he preached and
proclaimed the folly and wickedness of attempting to change the
religious opinions of men by the application of force--the utter
unreasonableness of persecuting orderly people in this world about
things which belong to the next--the gross injustice of sacrificing
any one's liberty or property on account of creed if not found
breaking the laws relating to natural and civil things.
Hence, from principle as well as from necessity, when he came to
formulate a political constitution for his colony, he laid it down as
the primordial principle: "I do, for me and mine, declare and
establish for the first fundamental of the government of my province
that every person that doth and shall reside therein shall have and
enjoy the free possession of his or her faith and exercise of worship
toward God, in such way and manner as every such person shall in
conscience believe is most acceptable to God. And so long as such
person useth not this Christian liberty to licentiousness or the
destruction of others--that is, to speak loosely and profanely or
contemptuously of God, Christ, the Holy Scriptures, or religion, or
commit any moral evil or injury against others in their
conversation--he or she shall be protected in the enjoyment of the
aforesaid Christian liberty by the civil magistrate."