>36 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



thanks above all to the influence of such men as 

 Voltaire, men of all creeds have slowly come to 

 admit that religious persecution is a detestable 

 crime, and one of the most fruitful of all the 

 causes of misery that depend upon the human 

 will. And, then, the advocates of the Churches 

 turn round and declare, with astonishing self- 

 possession, that they are not responsible ; perse- 

 cution is quite irreconcilable with the true spirit 

 of Christianity. If Philip II. or Louis XIV. or 

 Henry VIII. chose to persecute, so much the 

 worse for them and their instruments. Yes ! but 

 why did you not find that out a little sooner ? 

 If I were a landlord and had calmly sat by while 

 my agents extorted rents from my tenants by 

 dint of applying thumbscrews and rubbing pep- 

 per on their eyelids, am I — when my tenants 

 have grown strong enough to turn the tables — 

 to say, quietly, " Oh, it was quite against the let- 

 ter of my instructions ? " Why, then, did not I 

 return the rents, punish the agent, and make my 

 instructions a little plainer ? And now for me, a 

 fallible human being, substitute what you take to 

 be the immaculate Church of God, the medium 

 through which eternal truth is revealed to erring 

 man ; suppose that this Church profits and thrives 

 for a time by help of the most atrocious crimes 

 that have ever disgraced mankind ; that, far from 

 reviling the criminal, it has always denounced the 

 victim, and now, when it is down and the victim 

 on his legs, that it complacently observes that it 

 was all a mistake — what am I to think of such 

 a revelation and its God ? You can damn men 

 readily enough for not holding the right shade of 

 belief about mysteries which you loudly proclaim 

 to be inconceivable; did you ever — when you 

 were strong enough — bring your tremendous ar- 

 senal of threats to bear upon men who were mak- 

 ing a hell upon earth, and committing every 

 abomination under the sun in your name and 

 for your profit? You did not explicitly approve ? 

 or, rather, the persons who approved in your 

 name did it without proper authority ? But 

 what is the good of a body which can allow its 

 whole influence to be used in favor of unspeak- 

 able atrocities, till its power of inflicting them 

 has vanished? Persecution is either an impera- 

 tive duty, or it is one of the worst of crimes. 

 The Church, on Dr. Farrar's principle, " wisely" 

 allows us to hold either view. We can only say, 

 if it be right, uphold the doctrine and encounter 

 the disapproval of the conscience of mankind ; 

 we can, at least, honor your courage. But if it 

 be wrong, you cannot sneak out of your respon- 

 sibility by help of your legal quibblings without 



admitting that your true Church which is to guide 

 us unto all truth has only a potential existence, 

 while the concrete Church, which we can all see 

 and recognize, may be an accomplice in the worst 

 and most demoralizing of all the cruelties that 

 have left their stain upon history. 



And, now, may we not say just the same of 

 this doctrine of everlasting damnation ? While 

 the Christian creed flourished — and I use the 

 word Christian to mean the actual creed which 

 was implicitly accepted by concrete human be- 

 ings — dominated their consciences and was vivid- 

 ly realized by their imaginations — not a doubt 

 could be uttered of the truth of this dogma. 

 Protestants and papists agreed in enforcing it. 

 Catholics now claim at times that they are not 

 more intolerant than Protestants. Formerly it 

 was their popular and most troublesome argu- 

 ment against such men as Chillingworth, that a 

 Protestant could not be saved on the papist 

 theory, while a papist might possibly be saved 

 on the Protestant theory. Threats of hell-fire 

 crossed each other as thickly as bullets in a bat- 

 tle. Turks, Jews, and heretics, and even unbap- 

 tized children, the vast majority of the whole 

 race, were consigned to its flames as freely as 

 brutes to annihilation, by "thousands of theo- 

 logians " and millions of ordinary believers. On- 

 ly a few milder thinkers could breathe a half- 

 suppressed whisper of doubt under imminent 

 peril of heresy. Fanatics, preachers, and ora- 

 tors, exhausted their ingenuity in giving form 

 and reality to the conception. Men, women, 

 and little children, were driven into paroxysms 

 of hysterical excitement, numbers into madness, 

 by vehement and unreproved declamation. Every 

 cruelty of the persecutors was justified by the 

 necessity of saving souls from hell. And now, at 

 last, your creed is decaying. People have dis- 

 covered that you know nothing about it ; that 

 heaven and hell belong to dream-land ; that the 

 impertinent young curate who tells me that I 

 shall be burned everlastingly for not sharing his 

 superstition is just as ignorant as I am myself, 

 and that I know as much as my dog. And, then, 

 you calmly say again : " It is all a mistake ; this, 

 and that, and the other excellent man cherished 

 a benevolent doubt ; perhaps aluvios means a lim- 

 ited time or has necessarily no relation to time at 

 all, or has both meanings at once ; only believe 

 in a something — and we will make it as easy for 

 you as possible. Hell shall have no more than a 

 fine, equable temperature, really good for the con- 

 stitution; there shall be nobody in it except Judas 

 Iscariot and one or two more ; and even the poor 



