The separation, however, is peaceful, not hostile, as it was in the Ante-Nicene age, when
the pagan state persecuted the church. Nor is it a separation of the nation from Christianity. The
government is bound to protect all forms of Christianity with its day of rest, its churches, its
educational and charitable institutions.^104 Even irreligion and infidelity are tolerated within the
limits of the law of self-preservation. Religious liberty may, of course, be abused like any other
liberty. It has its necessary boundary in the liberty of others and the essential interests of society.
The United States government would not tolerate, much less protect, a religion which requires
human sacrifices, or sanctions licentious rites, or polygamy, or any other institution inconsistent
with the laws and customs of the land, and subversive of the foundation of the state and the order
of Christian civilization. Hence the recent prohibition of polygamy in the Territories, and the
unwillingness of Congress to admit Utah into the family of States unless polygamy is abolished by
the Mormons. The majority of the population decides the religion of a country, and, judged by this
test, the American people are as Christian as any other on earth, only in a broader sense which
recognizes all forms of Christianity. While Jews and infidels are not excluded from the enjoyment
of any civil or political right on account of their religion or irreligion, they cannot alter the essentially
Christian character of the sentiments, habits and institutions of the nation.
There are three important institutions in which church and state touch each other even in
the United States, and where a collision of interests may take place: education in the public schools,
marriage, and Sunday as a day of civil and sacred rest. The Roman Catholics are opposed to public
schools unless they can teach in them their religion which allows no compromise with any other;
the Mormons are opposed to monogamy, which is the law of the land and the basis of the Christian
family; the Jews may demand the protection of their Sabbath on Saturday, while infidels want no
Sabbath at all except perhaps for amusement and dissipation. But all these questions admit of a
peaceful settlement and equitable adjustment, without a relapse into the barbarous measures of
persecution.
The law of the United States is supreme in the Territories and the District of Columbia, but
does not forbid any of the States to establish a particular church, or to continue a previous
establishment. The Colonies began with the European system of state-churchism, only in a milder
form, and varying according to the preferences of the first settlers. In the New England
Colonies—except Rhode Island founded by the Baptist Roger Williams—orthodox
Congregationalism was the established church which all citizens were required to support; in
Virginia and the Southern States, as also in New York, the Episcopal Church was legally established
and supported by the government.^105 Even those Colonies which were professedly founded on the
basis of religious toleration, as Maryland and Pennsylvania, enacted afterwards disabling clauses
against Roman Catholics, Unitarians, Jews and infidels. In Pennsylvania, the Quaker Colony of
William Penn, no one could hold office, from 1693 to 1775, without subscribing a solemn declaration
(^104) The government even indirectly supports it in part by exempting church buildings, hospitals, colleges and theological seminaries
from public taxation, and by appointing chaplains for the army and navy and for Congress, in deference to the Christian sentiment of the
people.
(^105) A Presbyterian minister, Francis Makemie, was arrested on a warrant of the Episcopal Governor Cornby of New York, Jan. 20,
1707, for preaching in a private house, without permission, and although he was ably defended in a public trial and acquitted on the ground
that he had been licensed to preach under the Act of Toleration, he had to pay the costs of the prosecution as well as the defence to the
large amount of £83 7s. 6d. See Briggs, American Presbyterianism, New York, 1885, pp. 152-154.