Page:New England and the Bavarian Illuminati.djvu/51

 table Isaac Backus, whose unwearied advocacy of the rights of the individual conscience was exceeded by none. The likeness of the struggle which dissenters were making for freedom of conscience to that which the colonists were making for civil liberty was a favorite notion of this doughty penman; and such an argument presented when the imaginations of his countrymen were stirred by the political situation, could not fail of its appeal. Three years before the war broke out, in his Appeal to the Public for Religious Liberty, Backus had drawn for the benefit of the public a sharp distinction between the spheres of ecclesiastical and civil governments. The former was armed only with light and truth, and was commissioned to "pull down the strongholds of iniquity," to gather into Christ's church those who were willing to be governed by His teachings, and to exclude those who would not be so governed; while the latter "is armed with the sword to guard the peace and to punish those who violate the same." * In his Government and Liberty Described, and Ecclesiastical Tyranny Exposed, published in 1778, he attacked the notion of men "assuming a power to govern religion, instead of being governed by it," and asserted that the essence of true religion is a voluntary obedience to God. 2 Here was strong meat for a people for whom the word freedom was rapidly coming to have an enlarged signification.

The most convincing exposition of the democratic tendencies of the age came from another quarter, and in a sense belonged to the past. Spurred by the fact that at the beginning of the century a resolute effort had been made, both in Massachusetts and Connecticut, to obtain more compact and rigid ecclesiastical control, 3 the Reverend John


 * 1 Backus, op. cit., p. 13.


 * 2 Quoted from Backus, History of New England, vol. ii, p. 223.


 * 3 Walker, History of the Congregational Churches in the United States, pp. 206-209.