 Individualism, a reader, edited by George H. Smith and Marilyn Moore, narrated by James Foster. 21. From the Essential Rights and Liberties of Protestants, Elisha Williams. The Essential Rights and Liberties of Protestants, a seasonable plea for the liberty of conscience and the right of private judgment in matters of religion, Boston, S. Nieland, and T. Grayne, 1744. Elisha Williams, 1665 to 1755, a Yale graduate, served in the Connecticut General Assembly as a judge on the Connecticut Supreme Court and as a delegate to the Albany Congress in 1754. In this passage from the Essential Rights and Liberties of Protestants, we find one of the best 18th century discussions of the inalienable right of conscience, a key element of religious individualism. Every man has an equal right to follow the dictates of his own conscience in the affairs of religion. Everyone is under an indispensable obligation to search the scripture for himself, which contains the whole of it, and to make the best use of it he can for his own information in the will of God, the nature and duties of Christianity. And as every Christian is so bound, so he has an inalienable right to judge of the sense and meaning of it, and to follow his judgment wherever it leads him. Even an equal right with any rulers be they civil or ecclesiastical. This I say I take to be an original right of the human nature, and so far from being given up by the individuals of a community, that it cannot be given up by them if they should be so weakest to offer it. Man by his constitution as he is a reasonable being capable of the knowledge of his maker is a moral and accountable being, and therefore, as everyone is accountable for himself, he must reason, judge and determine for himself. That faith and practice which depends on the judgment and choice of any other person and not on the person's own understanding, judgment and choice may pass for religion in the synagogue of Satan, whose tenet is that ignorance is the mother of devotion, but with no understanding Protestant will it pass for any religion at all. No action is a religious action without understanding and choice in the agent. Once it follows the rights of conscience are sacred and equal in all, and strictly speaking unalienable. This right of judging everyone for himself in matters of religion results from the nature of man and is so inseparably connected therewith that a man can no more part with it than he can with his power of thinking, and it is equally reasonable for him to attempt to strip himself of the power of reasoning as to attempt the vesting of another with this right. And whoever invades this right of another, be he pope or Caesar, may with equal reason assume the other's power of thinking and so level him with the brutal creation. A man may alienate some branches of his property and give up his right in them to others, but he cannot transfer the rights of conscience unless he could destroy his rational and moral powers or substitute some other to be judged for him at the tribunal of God. This has been Individualism a Reader, edited by George H. Smith and Marilyn Moore, narrated by James Foster. Copyright 2015 by the Cato Institute. Production copyright 2015 by the Cato Institute.