Remembering the Toleration Act and the good of religious liberty

In his Lyceum Address, a young Abraham Lincoln praised the Founding Fathers for creating “a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us.” The future president saw the link between the two spheres of freedom, stating that our political liberties depend on our religious ones and vice versa.

Though Lincoln saw America as liberty’s fullest manifestation, our nation owes a great debt to the mother country, England, for putting us on that path. Today marks an important anniversary of that history.