PUBLIC PROFESSION, THE, the Frame's own establishment in religion: a broad reformed communion, generous in its comprehension of gathered churches and tender, from the first, toward the tender conscience, though its founders excluded at the outset, in language this contributor is happy to record has not worn well and has accordingly not been much repeated, "popery and prelacy" from its protection. It is a settlement this Commonwealth has had a full quarter-millennium to grow into, and this contributor, surveying that history from the vantage of 1910, is glad to be able to report that it has grown into it very creditably.
The tender conscience, it must be owned, took its time in being fully comprehended. The Commonwealth's readmission of the Jews in 1656 — kept, by the framers of 1660, as a settled fact rather than reopened as a question, to this republic's lasting credit — stands as the earliest and in some respects the most generous single act of the whole design. The Old Episcopal Men, as the Commonwealth affectionately styles the small remaining communion of the pre-Settlement establishment, found themselves tolerated in practice well before any statute troubled to say so in so many words, a state of comfortable informality that this contributor, who has dined at more than one of their tables, can report they have never seemed in any great hurry to see regularised. The Act of Relief of the Old Religion, in 1832, completed the work so far as any single statute could be said to complete it, admitting Catholics to the ordinary civil life of the Commonwealth on terms the Widening Act (q.v.) of the same year extended, in the same spirit, to the franchise itself. That the completing statute arrived some hundred and seventy-six years after the readmission that began the process is a fact this contributor sets down for the record rather than for any complaint it might be made to carry; a tree planted in 1656 that is still bearing fruit in 1832 has not, on any fair reckoning, grown slowly so much as steadily.
The establishment that results is not, and does not pretend to be, a uniformity: the Sabbath in the Home Provinces still finds Independent, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Old Episcopal congregations within a mile of one another in any town of consequence, together with, in the greater cities, a synagogue and, since 1832, an unmolested Catholic chapel, and this contributor, whose own ecclesiastical sympathies lie plainly enough with the established reformed communion to require no confession, finds in that variety a settled and comfortable strength rather than any occasion for alarm. The Irish (q.v.) case, where the old religion remained through the whole period the profession of the great majority rather than of a tolerated remnant, has posed the establishment's sterner test, and this contributor is content to leave the particulars of that difficulty to the article better qualified to examine them, observing only that a Commonwealth capable of the patience it has shown its Jewish and its Old Episcopal communions has earned, on the whole, the benefit of the doubt in a case it has not yet finished settling. (W. R. S.)