On religious toleration......................

     Madison, half Mason's age, improved his language, proposing a crucial change to the clause on religious liberty.  Mason's draft, reflecting a hundred years of liberal thought going back to John Locke, called for "the fullest toleration in the exercise of religion."  Yet this did not seem liberal enough for Madison.  Toleration implies those who tolerate: superiors who grant freedom to others.  But who can be trusted to pass such judgments, even if the judgment is to live and let live?  Judges may change their minds.  The Anglican establishment of Virginia, compared with established churches in other colonies, had been fairly tolerant—except when it hadn't, and then it made water in Baptists' faces.  So Madison prepared an amendment.  "All men are equally entitled to the full and free exercise" of religion.  No one could be said to allow men to worship as they wished:  they worshipped as they wished because it was their right as men.  Madison's language shifted the ground of religious liberty from a tolerant society or state, to human nature, and lifted the Declaration of Rights from an event in Virginia history to a landmark of world intellectual history.

-Richard Brookhiser,  James Madison