The upshot was religious freedom, the separation of church and state, according to Article VI, Section 3, of the Federal Constitution: “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” This clause was opposed on both sides—by Massachusetts as being too liberal, by Virginia and Rhode Island as not liberal enough. Virginia had two years before this overthrown her state church and given complete freedom of conscience—not toleration—to all her people. The opposition even to toleration was becoming crystallized in the words of Thomas Paine: “Toleration is not the opposite of intolerance, but the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms: the one assumes to itself the right of withholding liberty of conscience, the other of granting it.” So the first amendment to the Constitution, adopted immediately afterward by motion of the first Congress, and by the required two-thirds of the states, was: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” This was tremendously significant of the growing and newly conscious group mind of the United States of America. It was equally important for the future of the nation and its unity in days to come. Religious liberty was not a matter of doctrine in its inception; it was the product of the birth and development of the group mind of the nation. It meant the relinquishment of the racial habits, of the state laws, of the old urge to persecute (common to almost every group, even those who were themselves refugees from persecution), and the adoption of a national standard to which every state, every church and every sect should bring its sacrifice. And if this sacrifice was not of their own right to live, but only of the right to make others miserable, it was nevertheless the sacrifice of something so important that the demand had convulsed France, Germany and England not many years before. Religious liberty, indeed, however firmly based on law and political ideals, never became the habit of thought and action which intolerance had been. A recurrent phenomenon of American life has been the breaking up into religious, racial and sectional groups, with a further synthesis of Americanization, through some common interest to unite them. The conflict among the many groups prior to the adoption of the Constitution, and its solution in that document with its Bill of Rights, has been paralleled at least four times from that period to the present day. 3. These four reactions against the immigrant correspond with the four peaks of the curve of immigration into the United States, with two great alterations in the process, corresponding to the Civil War and the World War.