In very much the same way the colonists, in the struggles against royal oppression, felt the need for a higher and more comprehensive sanction for their conduct and following the precedent set them by the Puritans of the seventeenth century, they fell back upon the notion of inalienable rights possessed by each individual independent of society. Here, too, the inspiration and original setting of these ideas were strongly religious. Religious toleration had gained constitutional recognition in almost all the colonies so that the political movement out of which American freedom was born had the powerful support of religious sanction. To this fact must be attributed in part at least the tone of finality and absoluteness in the American declarations of rights. Out of this universal recognition of liberty of conscience arose the notion of a right of a higher sort not inherited but inherent and inalienable because rooted in man's religious nature--"a God-given franchise." This sense of the inherent and inalienable nature of the rights of conscience was, under the stress of the immediate political exigencies of the struggle with England, very easily and naturally extended from the sphere of religion to that of civil and political rights. It provided the sanction for the break with the mother-country that was contemplated. Virginia's declaration of rights was intended to be law, for the preamble states that these rights "do pertain to them (the people of Virginia) and their posterity as the basis and foundation of government." And what are these rights? They are first of all, "That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they can not by any compact deprive or divest their posterity, etc."[142] Thus, from the logic of events and not as a result of a philosophical speculation, the Revolutionary fathers were forced to take advanced ground in their definition of human rights. Leaving the fixed social order of the old country for the wilderness, where the only society was that of the savage, they naturally looked upon government as arising out of a compact behind which lay the sovereign autonomy of the individual by virtue of inalienable rights given him by God. What more natural in their revolt from the old country than to make this doctrine the political and moral sanction of their course?