He proceeds to argue that every one has an equal right to choose his religion, since each one must answer at God's judgment seat for his own choice and his life's acts. Consequently, there is no warrant for the making of religious laws and the laying of ecclesiastical taxes. With this premise, it followed that the Baptist exemption act of 1729 was defective and unjust, in that it demanded certificates; and from this time there began a steadily increasing opposition to the giving of these papers. Backus objected to the certificates upon several grounds, chief of which were:-- (1) Because the very nature of such a practice implies an acknowledgement that the civil power has right to set one religious sect up above another.... It is a tacit allowance that they have the right to make laws about such things which we believe in our own conscience they have not. (2) The scheme we oppose tends to destroy the purity and life of religion. (3) The custom which they want us to countenance is very hurtful to civil society.... What a temptation then does it not lay for men to contract guilt when temporal advantages are annexed to one persuasion and disadvantages laid upon another? _i.e._, in plain terms, how does it tend to lying hypocrisy and lying? [159] In all his writings this man pleads the cause of religious liberty, and, whenever possible, he emphasizes the likeness of the struggle of the dissenters for freedom of conscience to that of the colonists for civil liberty, and argues the injustice of wresting thousands of dollars from the Baptists for the support of a religion to them distasteful, while they exert themselves to the utmost to win political freedom for all; "with what heart can we support the struggle?"