The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 3

III. The Groundwork of Religious Liberty

On the right were partisans of the Established Church, clinging to lawful order. On the left were the Independents, or Separatists, who proposed to abandon, if not to abolish, Establishment. The Puritans merely wished to purify the Anglican system. But ultimately the advocates of uniformity and suppression failed. In the process of time, out of the clash of the sects, the ferment of opinion, and the growth of doubt, came religious toleration. ⁶ PFF3 141.2

Thus the gates of the American colonies were gradually opened to every religious faith that was stirring the Old World -Catholics, Separatists, Puritans, Quakers, Presbyterians, and Baptists from the British Isles, and Lutherans, Dunkards, Moravians, Mennonites, Huguenots, and Salzburgers from the Continent. All found sanctuary in the New World. ⁷ The traditional solidarity of church and state ultimately disintegrated by the incoming of a revolutionary philosophy of individual rights which freed the individual from subjection to a fixed group status. ⁸ The transition to the rationalism of the eighteenth century in the other colonies was gradual. But in New England it was marked by a spiritual crisis. The reaction from the witch trials was one factor. The rising tide of belief in separation of church and state, rather than in a theocracy, was another. ⁹ PFF3 141.3