TOLERATION is the liberty which, in some countries where a particular form of religion is established by law, is allowed to nonconformists to publicly teach and defend their theological and ecclesiastical opinions, and to worship whom and how they please, or not at all. But no permission is thereby given to violate the rights of others, or to infringe laws designed for the protection of decency, morality, and good order, or for the security of the governing power. The enforcement of this class of laws, which have merely civil and political objects in view, is indispensable to the public welfare, and must proceed without regard to the notions of religious duty which their con traveners may entertain or profess. In Britain, there are still in force certain statutes imposing penalties on opinions and practices generally regarded as impious, and which were thought to be criminal because of their offensiveness to God (see BLAsrumay); but these laws are seldom executed now, the opinion having become prevalent, that, except when the religious feelings of the public are so wantonly outraged as to make the per petrator a nuisance, theological error is best opposed by refuting it, and that when those accused of heresy (q.v.) are men of piety and earnest conviction, any degree of severity short of extirpation tends rather to diffuse than to suppress their tenets. Besides, the right of private judgment in matters of faith and worship is now more generally recognized in practice than it used to be, though such is human pride that even yet many resent the exercise, by their neighbors who differ from them, of the freedom which they claim for themselves. They seem to forget the maxim that we should do to others as we would have others to do to us—a principle admirably applied by St.. Paul to the case of religious differences (Rom. xiv.), and which indeed is the only one that has been found to work well in all circumstances for every sect; it condemns not only political disabilities and restraints unwarranted by the exigences of the state, but still more, that uncharitable treatment through which, almost exclusively, the spirit of intolerance can now find a vent in free Protestant countries. Were it not for the inconsistency thus dis played in our own day by many professing advocates of the right of private judgment, it might seem wonderful that the Reformers, by whom that right was first asserted, and who on no other ground could justify their separation from the church of Rome, became in their turn the persecutors, not only of the Romanists, who had persecuted them, but of such fellow-Protestants as had drawn from Scripture conclusions that differed from their own. Instances of such inconsistency on the part of the Reformers and their successors will be found in the articles CALVIN, SERVETUS, SOCLNUS, BIDDLE, and JEWS. In a church claiming infallibility (q.v.), and believing that salvation is unattainable beyond her pale, it is not only consistent, but to her most earnest members must seem a. duty, to prevent by force the spread of what is accounted a fatal hersey; and, in fact, toleration has never been either professed or practiced by the church of Rome. See ALBIGENSES, WALDENSES, DOMINICANS, INQUISITION, HUGUENOTS, BARTHOLOMEW'S (ST) DAY, NANTES (EDICT OF), CEVENNES, DRAGONNADES. But even the Puritans (q.v.), though long oppressed themselves, were so blind to the right of others to differ from them, that in their own brief day of power they eagerly repudiated, by word and deed, as a monstrous and impithis error, the principle of a universal toleration. In the assembly of divines (q.v.) held at Westminster in 1643-46, the Presbyterian members fought successfully against the proposal of the Independents that all sects should alike be tolerated. "We hope," wrote Baillie to his Presbyterian friends in Scotland, "that God will assist us to remonstrate the wickedness of such a toleration For this.
point, both they and we contend tanguam pro aris et foci.s" (Baillie's Letters, ii 328, 350; Bannatyne club ed. : see also the strong expressions of George Gillespie, another member of the assembly, in his Propositions concerning the Ministry and Government of the Church, prop. 41 and 42). We accordingly find in the 23d chapter of the Westminster Confession an assertion of the duty of the magistrate to promote the true religion, and to restrain and punish heterodoxy—a principle which, soon after the restoration, was found to work very inconveniently for the Presbyterians themselves, the magistrate being then one who differed from them as to what the true religion was. The Independents, on the other hand, had learned the lesson of toleration in Holland—that nursery of liberty in modern Europe—whither they had fled from oppression in the reign of James I.; and it
is a mistake to suppose, as some have done, that they were the first to understand and practice the principles of religious freedom. In the 16th c., Zuinglius and the Hunger- eau reformer Dudith, disclaimed, by word and action alike, the notion that any man is entitled to assume, in his dealings with others, that his own interpretations of Scripture are true, and those of other men, if different, false and culpable. "You contend," wrote Dudith to Beza, " that Scripture is a perfect rule of faith and practice. But you are all divided about the sense of Scripture, and you have not settled who shall be judge. You say one thing; your opponent, Stancarus, says another. You quote Scripture; he -quotes Scripture. You reason; he reasons. You require me to believe you: I respect you; but why should I trust you rather than Stancarus? You say he is a heretic; but the papists say you are both heretics. Shall I believe them? You say that your lay hearers, the magistrates, and not you, are to be blamed, forit is they who banish and burn for heresy. fknow you make this excuse; but tell me, have not you instilled such prinbiples into their ears? . . . . Do you not daily teach that they who appeal from your confessions to Scripture ought to be punished by the secular power? . . .. When you talk of your Augsburg confession, and your Helvetic creed, and your unanimity, and your fundamental truths, I keep thinking of the sixth commandment—" Thou shalt not kill." In the history of England, also, from the Reformation to the Commonwealth, there is, as bishop Heber has observed, "abundant proof that (much as every religious party, in its turn, had suffered from persecution, and loudly and bitterly as each ad, in its own particular instance, complained of the severities exercised against its members) no party had yet been found to perceive the great wickedness of persecution in the abstract, or the moral unfitness of temporal punishment as an engine of religious con troversy. Even the sects who were themselves under oppression exclaimed against their rulers, not as being persecutors at all, but as persecuting those who professed the truth; and each sect, as it obtained the power to wield the secular weapon, esteemed it also a duty, as well as a privilege, not to bear the sword in vain."—Life of Jeremy Taylor, p. 27. It is chiefly to the many keen discussions in Holland and England during the cen tury which followed the restoration (aided, no doubt, by that moderation or indifference which characterized the Protestant churches a hundred years ago—by the ever-increasing number and power of the dissenters—and by that wider mental culture which enables men not only to see that diversity of mental gifts and acquirements naturally leads to diversity of opinion, but, in Cromwell's language, to "think it possible they may be mistaken':), that we must ascribe the tolerant spirit now actuating most of the statesmen Of England and the United States, and which has lately made rapid progress among the people at large. Not only is the right of free thought and discussion now generally recognized, but its necessity to the well-being of mankind is asserted by eminent thinkers. Mr. John Stuart Mill, in his able treatise On Liberty, thus sums up the grounds on which the necessity of such freedom is affirmed by him: "1 If any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this, is to assume our own infallibility. (2) Though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. (3) Even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to he, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but (4) the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct; the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience" (p. 95).