I verily believe that the great good which has been effected in the
world by Christianity has been largely counteracted by the pestilent
doctrine on which all the Churches have insisted, that honest disbelief
in their more or less astonishing creeds is a moral offence, indeed
a sin of the deepest dye, deserving and involving the same future
retribution as murder and robbery. If we could only see in one view,
the torrents of hypocrisy and cruelty, the lies, the slaughter, the
violations of every obligation of humanity, which have flowed from this
source along the course of the history of Christian nations, our worst
imaginations of Hell would pale beside the vision.