spirit of toleration in Virginia in the Seventeenth century.

Over against these conditions in Virginia, attention is often directed to the Act of Toleration passed in the colony of Maryland in 1649. But in the first place, the toleration in Maryland, as far as it went, was the happy result of the circumstance that Lord Baltimore, the proprietor, being a Roman Catholic, and holding his charter from a Protestant king, was drawn to toleration as a prudential measure; and in the second place, the toleration proclaimed by that famous act was of a very limited character, inasmuch as it prescribed the penalty of death to any one who denied the divinity of Christ or the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, and punished with fine, whipping and imprisonment whoever should utter reproachful words concerning the Virgin Mary or the holy apostles. Even the rigorous code of "Lawes, divine, morall, and martiall," promulgated by the London Company for the Virginia colony in 1611, hardly went beyond this.

Here we cannot forbear pausing to say that whoever will impartially compare the Virginia Bill of Rights with the famous English Bill of Rights of 1689 must be constrained to give the palm for statesmanship and for power of expression to the American document, and to confess that the great author of the English bill, Lord John Somers, illustrious and learned as he was, justly termed the "apostle of liberty" in his generation, and England's deliverer from the tyrannous yoke of James II, was here inferior in diction and in noble, patriotic passion, as well as in the masterly expression of the fundamental rights of man, to that plain Virginia farmer and vestryman of Pohick Church, George Mason of Gunston.

The Virginia statute of religious liberty is to be traced to the same source, the sons of the Established Church. In old Bruton Church at Williamsburg, a tablet has been placed, inscribed as follows:

"To the glory of God and in memory of the members of the committee which drafted the law establishing religious freedom in Virginia, Thomas Jefferson, vestryman of St. Ann's Parish; Edmund Pendleton, vestryman of Drysdale Parish; George Wythe, vestryman of Bruton Parish; George Mason, vestryman of Truro Parish; Thomas Ludwell Lee, vestryman of Overwharton Parish,-being all the members of the committee."

These men could not tolerate special privilege, even when their own church was its beneficiary. Their love of liberty, their abhorrence of the injustice of requiring any man to support a religion or a church in which he did not believe, was such that they were willing to be considered the enemies of their mother church in depriving her of such special privileges, confident that in doing so they were really setting her free, and striking from her limbs weights that clogged her progress; and so it came to pass that dissenters in Virginia owed their emancipation from the ecclesiastical inequalities of the church establishment chiefly to these illustrious sons of the Episcopal Church. Indeed, at an earlier date, in 1776, the bond between church and state was severed and the Episcopal Church in Virginia disestablished by the aid of her own lay members.

Still more conspicuous were the services of the sons of this Anglo-Saxon church to civil liberty. As already stated, it was in a church builded at Jamestown that the House of Burgesses met on July 30, 1619-more than twelve months before the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock-to legislate for the welfare of the people-the first autonomous body of legislators assembled on American

Vol. 10-29

soil, and the forerunner and prototype of all free legislative bodies since organized in our country. It was in another Episcopal Church of Virginia— old St. John's of Richmond-that the great orator of the Revolution, Patrick Henry, himself a devout son of the church, thundered the popular demand for freedom from the oppressive rule of the British crown, in that speech in which he cried, "Give me liberty or give me death!" Indeed, the church buildings of the establishment throughout the colony were largely used for assemblies of patriots at the time of the Revolution.

Eminent Members of the Established Church and Their Influence.

Upon the whole it is not too much to say that the greatest thinkers, orators and organizers, as well as the one supreme soldier of the Revolutionary epoch, were sons of the Established Church of Virginia. We may enumerate some of them:

George Mason, the friend and mentor of Washington, who, in June, 1776, drafted that profound and wonderful document, the Virginia Bill of Rights -the first written constitution of a free state, upon which the Massachusetts Bill of Rights was modeled, and all succeeding instruments of the kind adopted by the different colonies; Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence; Richard Henry Lee, the eloquent author and advocate of that audacious resolution, "that these colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states;" Peyton Randolph, who presided over the first congress of patriots which organized the Revolution; Patrick Henry, whose matchless eloquence fired the hearts of Americans, not only in Virginia, but all over the land, to take up arms against the king; George Wythe, one of the ablest and most conspic

uous of the Virginia patriots; Edmund Pendleton, first president of the court of appeals; Archibald Cary, the lion-hearted friend of liberty; James Madison, who earned the title of the "Father of the Constitution;" John Marshall, the great chief justice who became the most illustrious interpreter of the Constitution;* and finally George Washington, the Father of His Country, who having first won our independence by his sword, then by his patient and far-seeing statesmanship consolidated the Republic under the ægis of the Constitution. Among the soldiers of the Revolution, mention should be made also of Gen. Henry Lee, General Muhlenberg, General Wood and General Nelson, all sons of the Established Church in Virginia.

John Fiske, the Massachusetts historian, has told the world that there were five great men of that epoch who may be said to have made the nation,Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison and Marshall. Now all five of these makers of the Republic were sons of the Episcopal Church, and four out of the five were Virginians. To quote in fine the words of Mr. Sidney George Fisher of Pennsylvania, "We are still dominated by the ideas of these Virginians. We follow their thoughts. We obey the fundamental laws and principles they framed without even a desire to change them." If these historians are right, then the debt of this nation to that Virginia civilization and to the Established Church can hardly be exaggerated. It is not too much to say that the Anglo-Saxon church, planted in Virginia, led the way in the making of

The_Episcopal Church furnished thirty-four out of fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence. It also furnished twenty-five out of thirty-nine signers of the Constitution of the United States-about two-thirds of the whole number. And it gave to the Revolution and to the young Republic that brilliant financier and illustrious statesman, Alexander Hamilton.

the Republic. It was her voice, through these her sons, that taught the people the first rudiments of liberty. It was her influence that was most puissant, through these great men, in establishing our free institutions. Let the historian, who would estimate the place which that church ought to occupy in the annals of the Republic, look at the stature of the patriots whom she gave to the Revolution; let him observe that they are not only among the giants of that remarkable epoch-they are the greatest of the giants; and then let him ask himself how the story of the Revolution and the rise of the republic would have read, if the names of these men were blotted from our annals.

The answer to that question will gauge the debt of America to the Anglo-Saxon church established in Virginia.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.-Of the voluminous literature on the subject the following volumes may be mentioned: Anderson, J. S. M.: The Church of England in the Colonies (3 vols., 1856); Brown, Alexander: The Genesis of the United States (2 vols.), and The First Republic in America (1898); Brown: The Church for Americans; Fiske, John: Old Virginia and Her Neighbors; Goodwin, W. A. R.: Bruton Parish Restored (1907); Hawks, Francis: Narrative of Events Connected With the Rise and Progress of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Virginia; McConnell, S. D.: History of the American Episcopal Church (1891); Meade: Old Churches and Families in Virginia (1857); Perry: History of the American Episcopal Church (2 vols., 1885); Smith, Capt. John: History of Virginia; Tiffany, C. C.: History of the Protestant Episcopal Church (1895); The Records of the Virginia Company of London, The Court Book, from the Manuscript in the Library of Congress (2 vols., 1906); Hakluyt's Discourse of Western Planting; Hening's Statutes.

RANDOLPH HARRISON MCKIM,

President of the House of Clerical and Lay Deputies and Rector of the Church of the Epiphany, Washington, D. C.