But the Convention had strangely blundered. After having proclaimed unrestricted religious liberty, it had decisively invaded it. For a civil offence it had meted out an ecclesiastical penalty. For his disloyalty to the Federal government and the State, it declared under pains and penalties, that the pastor should neither marry the betrothed, bury the dead, administer the ordinances of the church, nor preach the gospel. Thus what, with a flourish of trumpets, it proclaimed in its Bill of Rights, it struck down by its enacted Oath of Loyalty. In its legislation it entered a sphere from which by its own pronunciamento it was utterly debarred. It forgot the pithy utterance of the martyred Lincoln, when appealed to restore a pastor to his parish and pulpit from which on political grounds he had been deposed by a Presbyterian synod, that “he could not run the government and churches too.” What a pity that the leaders of the Convention in their consuming zeal for loyalty undertook the impossible task of doing both. Especially when just the smallest modicum of logic in the interpretation of their own new Constitution would have kept them from this colossal folly. But blessed be the Supreme Court of the United States! About three years after the new Constitution had been ratified by the people, it declared by barely one majority that the notorious test oath was unconstitutional. A multitude in our State ever after held in grateful remembrance that one Federal judge, who tipped the scales against the oath that had too long been a thorn in the side of the body politic. CHAPTER XXVII THE WIND-UP