 Aquinas accepts the teaching of the Church of his era that no one can rightly be compelled to accept the Christian faith or membership of the Church, but that those who are members can and should be compelled by both ecclesiastical and state law to abstain from any public denial or renunciation of it. He treats such renunciation as an actionable breach of promise (passing silently over the fact that in most cases the promise was made not by the persons concerned but rather, in their early infancy, by their parents). And he regards public teaching of heresy as comparable to counterfeiting coin of the realm and therefore rightly punishable capitally by the secular authorities (the fact of false teaching having been ascertained by an ecclesiastical trial). His views about this matter are explicitly based on the evolving tradition of the Church and on what historical experience suggested were the effects of more permissive political or legal arrangements. So there are no theoretical obstacles to his ready acceptance of the judgment of later theologians and Church teachers that, as experience shows, it is more compatible with basic positions in his moral and political philosophy to hold that authentically personal judgment and freely chosen commitment are so important in relation to ultimate questions that all persons (even those whose beliefs about religion are false or ill-formed) have a moral right, and should have the corresponding legal right, to be free from state (and ecclesiastical) coercion in religious belief or action except in so far as their conduct would be contrary to the rights of others or to public peace or to public morality (that is, morality so far as it is publicly communicated or concerns actions which impact on the public) (Second Vatican Council, Declaration on Religious Liberty (1965)). Nor is it clear how he could resist the objection that, even if those baptized in infancy ratify the promises made on their behalf at baptism, the subscription of faith is not an undertaking to other people or the community, but rather is a matter which, as he says in a neglected passage elsewhere in his major writings (ScG III c. 80 n. 15), “pertains to that person alone as an individual [secundum se ipsum].”