That principle was this, "that some form of religion, dissent from which in- j volved serious civil disabilities was established in nearly all the Colonies by virtue, of either the local or the imperial law." These are the words of Ex-Provost Stille of the University of Pennsylvania, in his "Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania." ' Mr. 8tille has treated this subject so ably, and so well, and his conclusions being so nearly identical with those to which its investigation had already led the writer, that his statement (which has only appeared since this portion of this essay was begun) is here given in preference to the writer's own, which was not , quite so full, and because it corroborates his views.

"The truth is," says Mr. Stille, "that during the Colonial period we were essentially a nation of Protestants, with fewer elements outside Protestantism than were to be found in any countrj- of Europe, and that we, forced to do so, either by our own earnest conviction that such was the true method of supporting religion, or by the laws of the Mother-country, took similar methods of maintaining and perpetuating ■ our Protestantism, excluding those who dissented from | it from any share in the government, and frankly adopt- [ ingthe policy which had prevailed in England from the

time of Queen Elizabeth There were, it is true,

in some of the Colonies, especially New York, at times ' ineffectual murmuriugs ' against laws which forced people to pay taxes for the support of a ministry whose teachings were not in harmony with the religious sentiment of the great mass of the inhabitants,^ and in Pennsylvania there was a long, and at last a successful struggle to induce the Imperial Government to regard the affirmation of a Quaker as equivalent to the oath of another man ; but if there were any men in our Colonial history who, after the example of William Penn, and Lord Baltimore, lifted up their voices to protest, as these men had done, against the violation of the jirincipleof religious liberty here, I have not been able to discover their names.