The bottom of this theory of persecution is false. It is not permitted
to us to sacrifice the temporal good of any body of men to our own ideas
of the truth and falsehood of any religious opinions. By making men
miserable in this life, they counteract one of the great ends of
charity; which is, inasmuch as in us lies, to make men happy in every
period of their existence, and most in what most depends upon us.
But give to these old persecutors their mistaken principle, in their
reasoning they are consistent, and in their tempers they may be even
kind and good-natured. But whenever a faction would render millions
of mankind miserable, some millions of the race co-existent with
themselves, and many millions in their succession, without knowing, or
so much as pretending to ascertain, the doctrines of their own school
(in which there is much of the lash and nothing of the lesson), the
errors, which the persons in such a faction fall into, are not those
that are natural to human imbecility, nor is the least mixture of
mistaken kindness to mankind an ingredient in the severities they
inflict. The whole is nothing but pure and perfect malice. It is,
indeed, a perfection in that kind belonging to beings of a higher order
than man, and to them we ought to leave it. This kind of persecutors,
without zeal, without charity, know well enough, that religion, to pass
by all questions of the truth or falsehood of any of its particular
systems (a matter I abandon to the theologians on all sides), is a
source of great comfort to us mortals in this our short but tedious
journey through the world. They know, that to enjoy this consolation,
men must believe their religion upon some principle or other, whether of
education, habit, theory, or authority. When men are driven from any
of those principles, on which they have received religion, without
embracing with the same assurance and cordiality some other system, a
dreadful void is left in their minds, and a terrible shock is given to
their morals. They lose their guide, their comfort, their hope. None
but the most cruel and hard-hearted of men, who had banished all natural
tenderness from their minds, such as those beings of iron, the atheists,
could bring themselves to any persecution like this. Strange it is, but
so it is, that men, driven by force from their habits in one mode of
religion, have, by contrary habits, under the same force, often quietly
settled in another. They suborn their reason to declare in favour of
their necessity. Man and his conscience cannot always be at war. If
the first races have not been able to make a pacification between the
conscience and the convenience, their descendants come generally to
submit to the violence of the laws, without violence to their minds.