TRACTS ON LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE Kindle Edition $5.00 by Guilllermo Santamaria (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

According to a document from the Hansard Knollys Society’s first subscription cycle (1845–1846), this volume is a curated “first principles” anthology meant to put early English Baptist voices back into circulation—especially the ones who argued, at personal cost, that the state has no jurisdiction over the soul. It frames that project explicitly as a recovery of Baptist history and as a reminder that Baptists “first assert[ed] in this land… the right of every man to worship God as conscience dictates, in submission only to divine command,” and that they clung to that liberty through imprisonment and persecution.

Structurally, the book opens with a modern foreword and an editorial “Introductory Notice,” then builds a historical runway (sections moving through Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, and then “The Baptists”), so the reader feels the pressure-cooker that made the liberty-of-conscience question unavoidable. The editor also notes that for at least one major treatise, the author’s identity is uncertain; what can be inferred from the text is that he endured real deprivation, had lived in exile, and separated from other dissenters on issues including infant baptism and liberty of conscience—so the book is not abstract theory, but theology hammered out on the anvil of consequences. The heart of the volume is a set of tracts and petitions that argue (again and again, from slightly different angles) that coercion in religion is anti-Christian, self-defeating, and socially ruinous. One strand is the plea to rulers: dissenters promise civil obedience “for Conscience sake,” but insist they must obey God rather than men when worship is regulated by force—language that’s explicitly tied to scriptural patterns and the moral limits of magistracy. Another strand is the direct address to would-be enforcers (notably Presbyterians in the polemical setting of the time): the case is made “by scriptures and sound arguments” that a nation’s peace is preserved not by uniformity-through-punishment, but by allowing all to worship as persuaded by God’s word—while still restraining genuine public harms like violence, slander, and injury. One major featured piece is Leonard Busher’s 1614 supplication (reprinted later), which targets the machinery of coercion at its root by attacking the legitimacy of persecuting church power—portraying it as a “branch of the popish stock”—and urging Parliament to cut off “domination” and “compulsion against conscience.” The collection also shores up its argument by appealing to broader Christian testimony: it includes a compilation drawn from Jeremy Taylor’s Liberty of Prophesying, highlighting that early Christianity relied on “Christian and spiritual” means rather than corporal force, and that “the soul of man should be free, and acknowledge no master but Jesus Christ.” Net effect: the book isn’t merely “toleration” as a political convenience. It treats liberty of conscience as a Christian birthright grounded in Scripture, argues that persecution belongs to the logic of antichristian power, and insists that civil order and religious freedom are not enemies—because the state can punish genuine civil evils without pretending it can manufacture faith.