The affinity between the freedom of religion and of discussion, or between the right of an individual, to provide for
his eternal, and of a nation, to provide for its temporal welfare, has coupled them in one sentence, and confided both
to one security; so that the government possesses an equal
right to regulate religious and political discussion, by fine
and imprisonment. Glance your eye, reader, at courts and
juries, composed of opinion, religious or political, to try
opinion. Do you not see hierarchy or faction, ambition or
avarice, superstition or tyranny, invariably pronouncing
sentence? A trial of opinion can never be fair or just.
Whoever is of my opinion, acquits, of an adverse, condemns
me. Where nature disables us from judging impartially,
it forbids us to judge at all. The right of A to condemn
B, is no better than the right of B to condemn A; and a
clashing right cannot be a right in either. Monareby, aristocracy, democracy, and sects, religious and political,
judge of each other's opinions, as the Pope judged Calvin;
Calvin. Servetus: the independents, Charles; and Cromwell, the independents; the precise species of judging at
which the sacred prohibition discloses itself to be levelled,
by its reference to the probability of retaliation—“Judge
not, lest ye be judged."
Whether any consanguinity originally exists or not, between the freedom of religion and of discussion, the similarity between the moral effects of such freedom in relation to both is evident.
Wherever churches regulate religious opinion, and governments, political, persecution rages, pecuniary burdens multiply, blood flows and wretches burn. An abandonment of the regulation of religious opinion, discloses the effects of a similar policy with regard to political. Both species of regulation are exterminated by our policy, and we happily know only from books, that both prefer flattery to truth, persecution to liberty, and the money of the people to their happiness.
