ABSTRACT
In his creative action for civil liberty, James Madison wrote separation of church and state into the federal Constitution. Madison was not a church member, but attended church with regularity and reserved the unorthodoxy of his mature years for fireside conversation. Dr. Samuel Stanhope Smith, taking his bride to the Madison home in 1775, was invited to bring also Josiah Tucker's Apology for the Church of England as by Law Established and Phil Tumeaux's Essay on Toleration—a defense of dissenting ministers. To insure ratification of the new federal charter, Madison and his lieutenants finally promised to help plant a bill of rights in it through amendments to be submitted by Congress to the states. It was in his "Essay on Monopolies," written some time after he retired from the presidency, that Madison most clearly demonstrated the consistency and vigor of his views on separation of church and state, and the broad scope he gave to the First Amendment.
