productive of great disorders, and thus becomes, innocently indeed, but yet very certainly, the cause of the bitterest dissensions in the commonwealth.  To a mind not thoroughly saturated with the tolerating maxims of the Gospel, a preventive persecution, on such principles, might come recommended by strong, and, apparently, no immoral motives of policy, whilst yet the contagion was recent, and had laid hold but on a few persons.  The truth is, these politics are rotten and hollow at bottom, as all that are founded upon any however minute a degree of positive injustice must ever be.  But they are specious, and sufficiently so to delude a man of sense and of integrity.  But it is quite otherwise with the attempt to eradicate by violence a wide-spreading and established religious opinion.  If the people are in an error, to inform them is not only fair, but charitable; to drive them is a strain of the most manifest injustice.  If not the right, the presumption, at least, is ever on the side of possession.  Are they mistaken? if it does not fully justify them, it is a great alleviation of guilt, which may be mingled with their misfortune, that the error is none of their forging,—­that they received it on as good a footing as they can receive your laws and your legislative authority, because it was handed down to them from their ancestors.  The opinion may be erroneous, but the principle is undoubtedly right; and you punish them for acting upon a principle which of all others is perhaps the most necessary for preserving society, an implicit admiration and adherence to the establishments of their forefathers.

If, indeed, the legislative authority was on all hands admitted to be the ground of religious persuasion, I should readily allow that dissent would be rebellion.  In this case it would make no difference whether the opinion was sucked in with the milk or imbibed yesterday; because the same legislative authority which had settled could destroy it with all the power of a creator over his creature.  But this doctrine is universally disowned, and for a very plain reason.  Religion, to have any force on men’s understandings, indeed to exist at all, must be supposed paramount to laws, and independent for its substance upon any human institution,—­else it would be the absurdest thing in the world, an acknowledged cheat.  Religion, therefore, is not believed because the laws have established it, but it is established because the leading part of the community have previously believed it to be true.  As no water can rise higher than its spring, no establishment can have more authority than it derives from its principle; and the power of the government can with no appearance of reason go further coercively than to bind and hold down those who have once consented to their opinions.  The consent is the origin of the whole.  If they attempt to proceed further, they disown the foundation upon which their own establishment was built, and they claim a religious assent upon mere human authority, which has been just now shown to be absurd and preposterous, and which they in fact confess to be so.