Page:Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1st ed, 1833, vol III).djvu/737

not been entirely free from the scourge,^[1] defends the final enactments against nonconformity in England, in the following set phrases, to which, without any material change, might be justly applied his own sarcastic remarks upon the conduct of the Roman ecclesiastics in punishing heresy.^[2] "For nonconformity to the worship of the church," (says he,)

there is much more to be pleaded than for the former, (that is, reviling the ordinances of the church,) being a matter of private conscience, to the scruples of which our present laws have shown a very just, and Christian indulgence. For undoubtedly all persecution and oppression of weak consciences, on the score of religious persuasions, are highly unjustifiable upon every principle of natural reason, civil liberty, or sound religion. But care must be taken not to carry this indulgence into such extremes, as may endanger the national church. There is always a difference to be made between

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1. "Entirely"! Should he not have said, never free from the scourge, as more conformable to historical truth?
2. 4 Black. Comm. 45, 46.—His words are: "It is true, that the sanctimonious hypocrisy of the Canonists went, at first, no further, than enjoining penance, excommunication, and ecclesiastical deprivation for heresy, though afterwards they proceeded to imprisonment by the ordinary, and confiscation of goods in pios usus. But in the mean time they had prevailed upon the weakness of bigoted princes to make the civil power subservient to their purposes, by making heresy not only a temporal, but even a capital offence; the Romish Ecclesiastics determining, without appeal, whatever they pleased, to be heresy, and shifting off to the secular arm the odium and the drudgery of executions, with which they themselves were too tender and delicate to intermeddle. Nay, they pretended to intercede, and pray in behalf of the convicted heretic, ut citra mortis periculum sententia circum eum moderatur, well knowing, at the same time, that they were delivering the unhappy victim to certain death." 4 Black. Comm. 45, 46. Yet the learned author, in the same breath, could calmly vindicate the outrageous oppressions of the Church of England upon Catholics and Dissenters with the unsuspecting satisfaction of a bigot.

vol. iii.92