Excerpt from The Progress of Religious Freedom: As Shown in the History of Toleration Acts This treatise is an enlargement of a paper which I prepared for the first annual meeting of The American Society of Church History, held in the city of Washington, December 28, 1888. It traces the progress of Christianity in its relation to the State from persecution to toleration, and from toleration to freedom. It is a companion to my treatise on Church and State in the United States, which appeared in November, 1887. It properly precedes it, and ends where the other begins. Both together form a brief history of religious liberty in Europe and America. I have discussed the same subject in the introduction to the sixth volume of my Church History (pp. 50-86), and in separate essays (as in Christ and Christianity, pp. 276-291), but not so fully as here. This important chapter of Church History has not yet received proper attention, and is almost ignored in European works. It can best be written from the American standpoint, because America reaps the benefit of all the preceding Toleration Acts, and has successfully tested, by an experience of a full century, the system of religious freedom on the basis of legal equality and a peaceful separation of Church and State. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.