TOLERATION, in matters of religion, is either civil or ecclesiastical. Civil toleration is an impunity and safety granted by the state to every sect that does not maintain doctrines inconsistent with the public peace; and ecclesiastical toleration is the allowance which the church grants to its members to differ in certain opinions, not reputed fundamental.
As the gods of Paganism were almost all local and tutelary, and as it was a maxim universally received that it was the duty of every man to worship, together with his own deities, the tutelary gods of the country in which he might chance to reside, there was no room for persecution in the Heathen world, on account of different sentiments in religion, or of the different rites with which the various deities were worshipped. Had the primitive Christians joined their fellow-citizens in the worship of Jupiter, Juno, and the rest of the rabble of Roman divinities, they would have been suffered to worship, without molestation, the Creator of the world and the Redeemer of mankind; for in that case the God of the Christians would have been looked upon as a Being of the same kind with the gods of the empire; and the great principle of intercommunity would have remained unviolated. But the true God had expressly prohibited both Jews and Christians from worshipping any other god besides Himself; and it was their refusal to break that precept of their religion which made their Heathen masters look upon them as Atheists, and persecute them as a people inimical to the state. Utility, and not truth, was the object for which the Heathen legislatures supported the national religion. They well knew that the stories told by their poets of their different divinities, of the rewards of Elysium, and of the punishments of Tartarus, were a collection of senseless fables; but they had nothing better to propose to the vulgar, and they were not such strangers to the human heart, as to suppose that mankind could live together in society without being influenced in their conduct by some religion.
Widely different from the genius of Paganism was the spirit of the Jewish dispensation. Truth, which is in fact always coincident with general utility, was the great object of the Mosaic law. The children of Israel were separated from the rest of the world, to preserve the knowledge, and worship of the true God, at a time when all the other nations on earth, forgetting the Lord that made them, were falling prostrate to stocks and stones, and worshipping devils and impure spirits. Such was the contagion of idolatry, and so strong the propensity of the Israelites to the customs and manners of the Egyptians, and other polytheistic nations around them, that the purpose of their separation could not have been served, had not Jehovah condescended to become not only their tutelary God, but even their supreme civil Magistrate (see THEODOC. no 151.); so that under the Mosaic economy, idolatry was the crime of high treason, and as such justly punished by the laws of the state. Among the Jews, the church and state were not indeed different societies. They were so thoroughly incorporated, that what was a sin in the one was a crime in the other; and the forfeiture of ecclesiastical privileges was the forfeiture of the rights of citizens.
In many respects the Christian religion is directly opposite to the ritual law of Moses. It is calculated for all nations, and intended to be propagated among all. Instead of separating one people from another, one of its principal objects is to disseminate universal benevolence, and to incul-