From the moment of the adoption of our Federal Constitution, expressly forbidding an "establishment of religion," Christianity, whatever its status under the common law, ceased to form an integral part of the law of the United States, and became simply one of many forms of private belief, the relative number of its adherents being totally immaterial. In the treaty with Tripoli, secured during the administration of George Washington, our first great President placed his signature to the specific statement that the government of this land is in no sense founded on the Christian religion. The forenamed gentlemen, one and all, far from lending strength to their cause by invoking the outworn traditions of the past and by appealing to the brute force of religious bigotry against the equal civic rights of all citizens, have turned state's evidence against their accomplices by the unthinking confession that the case for church exemption rests in the last analysis on treason to the Constitution and to the principle of separation of church and state. When the enemies of religious liberty and the rights of man thus come out in their true colors we know how to meet them. It is the insidious method of seeking to shelter church graft under pretensions of the common weal that is able to deceive the public for a time. * See "Crimes of Preachers." CHURCH AND STATE IN AMERICAN HISTORY. Our fight against church graft is not new, for through the ages of human history men slow in learning the lesson of equal liberty have made this warfare inevitable. Even those honestly desirous to be fair have found it easy to cheat themselves with convenient sophistry, and to frame fantastic reasons for deeming the public weal inseparably bound up with their particular group of dogmas, so that the good of mankind must require the submission of dissenters to the popular creed. That the whole community should be forced to support the church appeared axiomatic to the New England of Governor Bradford, Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards. The settlement of Rhode Island by Roger Williams and his associates, on the basis of complete religious liberty, was the first event to startle Puritanism into a realization that the right of the church to control the state was not as self-evident as had been thought. Later were heard bold voices to demand that the church take its proper position in the community as a voluntary body of believers, free to worship in its own fashion, and leaving all others free to do likewise or not to worship at all. And finally the foremost and boldest thinkers began to see that there could be no equal justice while unbelievers were mulcted in taxation to support the churches. One of the first protests against the wrong which still prevails, although now disguised under the form of exemption, took the shape of a memorial to the general court (legislature) of Massachusetts in 1775. The core of the argument is contained in the following paragraph: