Before Areopagitica

Abstract

The principle of religious freedom is declared by Masson to have been the precious fruit of the successive persecutions which attended the fission of English protestantism into sects more and more removed from Rome. He believes that the more each protesting body suffered from intolerance the more tolerant it became, that the more it was forced to contend for liberty for itself the more nearly it approached the conception of liberty for all, with the result that the implied principle was finally by the ultimate dissenters extricated from all the pain of cumulative persecution and kindled, as it were, “on the top of a light-house, on its own account.” To Milton, briefly anticipated by Roger Williams, Masson gives chief credit for enunciating this ideal of freedom as an end in itself. When other men argued for liberty, it was always a liberty with some limitation, liberty of such kind and degree as would suit some ulterior interest. When Milton spoke, it was to clarion forth a liberty pure, absolute, entire.