Page 276 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

religious freedom 1577

Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Mark Twain, one of America’s preeminent authors of made everybody a Presbyterian without any trouble,
the nineteenth century, was—and still is—well known but that would have been to affront a law of human
for his social commentary on important issues of his nature: spiritual wants and instincts are as various in
day, such as slavery. In A Connecticut Yankee in King the human family as are physical appetites, com-
Arthur’s Court, Twain comments on the importance of plexions, and features, and a man is only at his best,
religious freedom. morally, when he is equipped with the religious gar-
ment whose color and shape and size most nicely
I had started a teacher-factory and a lot of Sunday-
accommodate themselves to the spiritual complex-
schools the first thing; as a result, I now had an
ion, angularities, and stature of the individual who
admirable system of graded schools in full blast in
wears it; and, besides, I was afraid of a united
those places, and also a complete variety of Protes-
Church; it makes a mighty power, the mightiest con-
tant congregations all in a prosperous and growing
ceivable, and then when it by and by gets into self-
condition. Everybody could be any kind of a Chris-
ish hands, as it is always bound to do, it means
tian he wanted to; there was perfect freedom in that
death to human liberty and paralysis to human
matter. But I confined public religious teaching to
thought.
the churches and the Sunday-schools, permitting
Source: Twain, M. (1899). A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (p.77). Toronto,
nothing of it in my other educational buildings. I Canada: Random House.
could have given my own sect the preference and

as Hugo Grotius, Henry Parker, Thomas Hobbes, John
Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Sidney Algernon,
John Milton, Erasmus,Voltaire,Thomas More, and Dirck
Coornhert all protested the mania of the times—
“hereticide”—and took up their pens to propose new
political and theological bases for religious freedom.
Locke in particular was instrumental in proposing the
notion of the secular state, which removed jurisdiction
over religious matters from civil authority, thereby pro-
tecting each individual from state-mandated religious
conformity. He articulated a theory of natural rights that
placed fundamental rights of life, liberty (including reli-
gious freedom), and property beyond the reach of
government.

Spread of Religious Freedom
in America and Elsewhere
These ideas took root as nowhere else in America. Roger
Williams, who founded the colony of Rhode Island,
A plaque mounted on the wall of a Protestant fought an ideological war against theocratic traditional-
church in a small town in Provence, France, ists in Puritan New England. Williams set up a secular
recounts the Protestant fight for religious state and welcomed to his colony settlers of every reli-
rights in this mainly Roman Catholic region. gious persuasion, requiring only that they conform to