ABSTRACT
There are few issues so likely to generate heat rather than light as the question of the proper line between the realm of the state and that of the church. And yet, with the gratuitous courage they so often displayed, the framers of the Constitution's Bill of Rights began their blueprint for freedom by drawing exactly such a line. It is the function of this chapter to examine, not the theories of the commentators, but rather the actions and words of the Supreme Court in applying the constitutional language to the controversies that have come before it. This "neutral principle" has been framed in reliance on the Aristotelian axiom that "it is the mark of an educated man to seek precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits", than the Platonic precept that "a perfectly simple principle can never be applied to a state of things which is the reverse of simple".
