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they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that
among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” And the
Constitution guarantees, in the most explicit terms, the inviolability of
conscience: “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification
to any office of public trust under the United States.” “Congress shall
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting
the free exercise thereof.”
“The framers of the Constitution recognized the eternal principle
that man’s relation to his God is above human legislation, and his right
of conscience inalienable. Reasoning was not necessary to establish
this truth; we are conscious of it in our own bosom. It is this conscious-
ness, which, in defiance of human laws, has sustained so many martyrs
in tortures and flames. They felt that their duty to God was superior to
human enactments, and that man could exercise no authority over their
consciences. It is an inborn principle which nothing can eradicate.”
As the tidings spread through the countries of Europe, of a land
where every man might enjoy the fruit of his own labor, and obey
the convictions of his conscience, thousands flocked to the shores
of the New World. Colonies rapidly multiplied. “Massachusetts,
by special law, offered free welcome and aid, at the public cost, to
Christians of any nationality who might fly beyond the Atlantic ‘to
escape from wars or famine, or the oppression of their persecutors.’
Thus the fugitive and the down-trodden were, by statute, made the
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guests of the commonwealth.” In twenty years from the first landing
at Plymouth, as many thousand Pilgrims were settled in New England.
To secure the object which they sought,“they were content to earn
a bare subsistence by a life of frugality and toil. They asked nothing
from the soil but the reasonable returns of their own labor. No golden
vision threw a deceitful halo around their path.... They were content
with the slow but steady progress of their social polity. They patiently
endured the privations of the wilderness, watering the tree of liberty
with their tears, and with the sweat of their brow, till it took deep root
in the land.”
The Bible was held as the foundation of faith, the source of wisdom,
and the charter of liberty. Its principles were diligently taught in the
home, in the school, and in the church, and its fruits were manifest in
thrift, intelligence, purity, and temperance. One might be for years a
dweller in the Puritan settlements, and not “see a drunkard, nor hear