Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted … for my name’s sake.
—Matt. 24:9
3080 Lesson From The Clocks
Charles V was determined to compel all his subjects to adopt his way of thinking about religion. Thousands died rather than conform. Weary of a long reign, Charles abdicated in 1556, and retired to a monastery, where he amused himself by trying to make a dozen clocks run absolutely together.
When he failed, he exclaimed: “How foolish I have been to think that I could make all men believe alike about religion when I cannot even make two clocks run together.”
—Selected
3081 The Plymouth Rock Inscription
The inscription on the Plymouth Rock monument is a challenge to every generation of Americans: “This spot marks the final resting place of the Pilgrims of the Mayflower. In weariness and hunger and cold, fighting the wilderness and burying their dead in common graves that the Indians should not know how many had perished, they here laid the foundations of a state in which all men for countless ages should have liberty to worship God in their own way. All you who pass by and see this stone remember, and dedicate yourselves anew to the resolution that you will not rest until this lofty ideal shall have been realized throughout the earth.”
—The Watchman-Examiner
3082 Substitute Imprisonment
When Fox, the founder of the Friends or Quakers, was lying in filthy dungeon at Lancaster, a Friend went to Oliver Cromwell and offered himself, body for body, to lie in the prison in his stead, if Cromwell would accept the substitution and let Fox at liberty.
Cromwell was so struck with the offer that he said to the great men of his council, “Which of you would do as much for me if I were in the same condition?” Although he could not accept the Friend’s offer, because it was contrary to law, yet the power, he said, and truth of his generous offer “came mightily over him.”
—C. E. Macartney
3083 More Substitute Imprisonments
During the Commonwealth one hundred and sixty-four Quakers from different parts of the nation came up to Westminster and pleaded at the bar of the House of Commons for permission to substitute themselves, body for body in full tale, for their friends then lying in different prisons throughout the kingdom.
With the very odour of their lives of faith breathing upon the British senate, they stood before the Speaker with their quiet and serene faces, and presented this strange embarrassing request to a Parliament which had deposed Charles I for trampling upon the political rights of the people but which still held that religious opinions were to be prescribed and conscience governed by law.
—Elihu Burritt
3084 Napoleon On Religious Freedom
Nobly did Napoleon Bonaparte, in the year 1804, maintain the rights of conscience, in his reply to M. Martin, president of the Consistency of Geneva, in words worthy to be held in everlasting remembrance—”I wish it to be understood that my intention and my firm determination are to maintain liberty of worship. The empire of the law ends where the empire of the conscience begins. Neither the law nor the prince must infringe upon this empire.”
—H. C. Fish
3085 Conscience Belongs To God
When certain persons attempted to persuade Stephen, King of Poland, to constrain some of his subjects, who were of different religion, to embrace his, he said to them, “I am king of men, and not of consciences. The dominion of conscience belongs exclusively to God.”
—Whitecross
3086 Khrushchev’s Last Question
Of all questions publicly addressed to Khrushchev during his U.S. visit, the very last was the only one which evoked anything even approaching a serious discussion of religion under communism. It was asked by Edward P. Morgan of the American Broadcasting Company at the end of a news conference held in Washington just a few hours before Khrushchev left to return to Moscow.
Morgan: “Those of us who went to the U.S.S.R. with Vice President Nixon were surprised at the number of young people in church. If there is an increasing interest in religion, what will be your attitude towards churches?”
Khrushchev: “Well, first of all I believe the question itself confirms the fact that we do have a full freedom of conscience and religion in our country as we have been saying all along.
“Many of our young people hear about religion, about God, about saints, about church ceremonies, and they have a curiosity about this. Even if each one of them goes to church only once, they are so numerous that the doors of our churches would never close.
“So there is nothing surprising about these things.”
—Christianity Today
3087 Liberty’s One Exception
When Mexico’s new President, Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, accepted the presidential nomination, he pledged that his government would “protect and guarantee all liberties but one—the liberty of doing away with the other liberties.”
Diaz is expected to follow a middle course that will not tolerate extremism from either the left or the right. He once remarked, “I like to operate like a submarine on sonar. When I am picking up noise from both the left and the right, I know my course is correct.”
—New York Times