242 Force, Energy, and Will 



cease to be, in it the sacerdotal principle would remain and 

 would have sway.' No protest in the name of conscience can 

 logically have weight in the eyes of those who, denying all 

 freedom to the will, deny the very idea of conscience and of 

 right.^ And though the deeply planted and instinctive belief 

 in virtue and merit renders it impossible that such protest 

 should fail to arouse the generous sympathies of our fellow- 

 men, yet the tendency of such teaching as the Professor's is to 

 bring back that pagan idea of ' the State,' according to which 

 the individual citizen had no invincibly sacred rights, while the 

 supposed welfare of the community was proclaimed supreme. 

 It should never be forgotten, and least of all in these days, 

 when anti-Christian propagandism is so rife, that it was the 

 Jews and Christians, full of the spirit of enthusiastic and 

 vividly realised theism, who, for the first time, to the amaze- 

 ment of judges who would fain have been merciful, maintained 

 the sacred rights of conscience, and by patient endurance, 

 suiferings, and death vindicated the claim of each individual 

 — ^not only citizen, but slave — to the freedom of a rational 

 and responsible nature. 



Thus it is theism which alone gives a logical basis for 

 really tolerant views based on justice, and a belief in the 

 wonderful dignity of that human nature which has had con- 

 ferred upon it the divine gifts of reason, free-will, and respon- 

 sibihty. Armed, then, with these truths, we can inexpug- 

 nably defend the rights of conscience, we can, in the name 

 and by virtue of moral responsibility, repudiate persecut- 

 ing intolerance, whoever may be the victims, and, while 

 execrating the horrors of the Parisian Commune, join 

 also heartily in the venerable and universally esteemed 



1 Mr. Martineau has pointed out that according to the view advocated by 

 Professor Tyndall, Mr. Spencer, etc. , ' conscience is but a hoarded fund of 

 traditionary pressures of utility. . . . Our highest attributes are only the 

 lower that have lost their memory, and mistake themselves for something 

 else.' As before quoted, see ante, vol. i. p. 326. 



