FOR more than two thousand years has Paganism, with its philosophy of seepticism or indifference, and Christianity with its gentler precepts, in succession warred against the natural intolerance of man's self-opinion, or sought to tame the wild passions by which fanaticism degrades religion. The struggle has been long and fluctuating. the banner of toleration but slowly penetrating the hosts of its opponents; often stationary or retrograde, and for ages prostrate and overthrown. The battle still rages, and its battle-field throughout the civilised world exhibits marks of the various phases of the conflict. Results the most opposite are seen in different countries. While we look at isolated points, we are perplexed; but if we survey the entire field of operations, we may, by a more extensive induction, elicit some com

prehensive laws. We shall better understand in any one nation what to censure and what to forgive, when we have gathered a more varied experience, a less contracted charity, from a survey of the faults of all. It would be well if those who here babble of "Religious Equality" would for a moment enlarge their gaze, and read the world as it is now, not as it is not, and learn rather to cherish the freedom they possess, than preach visionary doctrines of an impracticable ideal, which those who inculcate can, least of any, enforce by their own example.

The history of the past is indeed filled with many a dark page; no deed of horror, no depth of guilt, no extremities of pitiless, desolating ferocity that may not there be found traced, and that did not, at some period, find its source or its palliation in the outraged name of religion. Christianity, baptised in blood and suffering, and nurtured in intolerance by its Pagan rulers, inherited too much the baleful legacy, adopted the lessons it had been thus rudely taught, and turned on its own bosom the weapons once wielded against it by its now prostrate foe. The tale is long and humiliating, fraught with many an instructive lesson to the calm and thoughtful student; nay, there is much in the present position of the world that it is impossible to

rightly understand without a reference to the history of each state. Both to Protestant and Roman Catholic nations we should often be guilty of injustice if we looked to their present position alone, and left out of view the tangled chain of causes from which the final result is wrought.

Still, for all but the philosopher in his closet, the practical business of life lies in the present as it exists, in the future as it may be controlled, and not in the grave of the past. From its dark oblivion each party disinters by turns some tale of cruelty or injustice, that covers with shame the descendants who bear the same name as the perpetrators, but which seldom yields instruction, never carries conviction, and always embitters their mutual animosities. The retrospection may be sometimes instructive to the philosopher, it is ever irritating to the many. It arouses prejudices already sufliciently strong, and provokes retaliation, not repentance. Take it as a whole, the world— unlike the human heart grows gentler, better, and kindlier, as it waxes older. The ordinary ferocity of former times we repudiate as a thing so wholly gone by, that we feel no responsibility for deeds that we no more sympathise with, and whose recurrence each age makes less possible. It is easy to prove the overwhelming persecutions by which the fanaticism of Roman Catholics in the ignorant ages, when no antagonist power had the influence to control its fury, crushed each rising effort at dissent; it is also easy to adduce many instances where the champions of the Reformation violated the principles they taught, and refused to accord the liberty of thought and judgment, on which they based their claims. But it is idle thus to wander in the tombs of the past, affrighting the world by the ghosts we have called from its recesses. Let us now leave the dark centuries to slum. ber in oblivion, and look more usefully -more hopefully-to the actualities of life.

Yet are there some portions of the past that still remain, and exercise a strong and living influence on the destinies of the present, and which cannot

be thus passed by. The outbursts of individual bigotry, even innumerable instances of what was then publicly authorised intolerance, prove nothing against those of the present day, who hold them in abhorrence. In all ages, in all religions, in all nations, will be found guilt and wickedness, and men who abuse the sacred name of religion, to work their selfish ends, and who arouse fierce passions, which they turn to their political purposes. No religion is to be judged by such examples; the acts of its professing members are not necessarily an exposition of its tenets. It is otherwise with principles that have not been repudiated, or laws that have not been repealed. While they are allowed to continue ostensibly, all who do not protest against them, who do not publicly express their dissent, must be content to be publicly involved in the natural consequences of such doctrines, and must share in their condemnation.

Many as were the fostering causes of the growth of intolerance, there was one without which it could not have finally triumphed, one that professes to be drawn from the bosom of Roman Catholicism, and one that survives to this day, at once to excuse and to perpetuate bigotry. An evil principle seldom attains permanent ascendancy if it do not pay homage to right by assuming the garb of virtue; but when the conscientious can persuade themselves that they admit the bad only to effect a necessary good, it becomes impossible to eradicate the error. The consolidation of the Roman Catholic Church under a single head first threw into prominence and importance the doctrine of exclusive salvation. It was boldly announced that those who dared to oppose this religion-nay, to deny a single item of its many essential dogmas, fell under its spiritual anathemas, were not included in its privileged pale, and were thus consigned to eternal perdition. Individual judgment quailed before such terrors, and shrank from a risk so awful; heresy became synonymous with damnation, and the timid were appalled by the possibility of a penalty so tremendous.

Hand in hand with this grew up the dogma of infallibility, which supplied what was wanting in the former. The one made adhesion to the Church the only passport to salvation, the other removed all doubts, and justified those who held such opinions in assuming

themselves to be certainly right, and all others as certainly wrong. Without this men might have had belief, conviction, but could not have had that self-confidence which alone could stitle the voice of humanity. The error they sought to destroy was, in their eyes, not only of fatal consequence, but of infallible certainty. Better, then, that a few should forfeit existence or liberty than that the poison should be suffered to spread its infection. If the crime of the murderer, convicted on fallible testimony, must be atoned with his blood, if we chain the suicidal arm that presumptuously seeks to rob the body of life, how much more shall we silence, with the scaffold or the dungeon, the men whose undoubted errors must surely kill immortal souls?

Such reasoning is not yet extinct, and, unhappily, even those who may not assent to its full consequences, must yet be swayed by its secret influence. The more conscientious the Roman Catholic, the more deeply he is penetrated by the importance of his religion, and the more profoundly he must feel that all petty obstacles of sentiment, or apparent morality, must yield before the one great end of advancing his own religion, and annihilating those of others.

Illiberality will, doubtless, find a more charitable expression than in former ages, but the tendency to it must still exist from the very same cause, and must require the freedom of enlarged ideas, and of an ever-progressing society, to neutralise its dangerous effects. Justice, however, demands that, while we trace in these Roman Catholic dogmas, peculiar elements of intolerance, we should also remember that their motive, at least, may be consistent with an imaginary charity, and that it only aims at forcing on the reluctant a boon supposed to be inestimable. The Protestant who persecutes has no such excuse; he violates the spirit of his religion, and the essence of his claim the freedom of conscience, and of thought.

Thus founded on a settled principle, persecution ceased to be the outburst of individual excesses, and was organised into the elaborate fabric of the famous Canon Law. Its existence has partially survived the modern spread of toleration; it is still dominant in many countries, and in all must tend to retard the progress of liberality