izen of the universe; and that famous line of Terence: "I am a man,
and I reckon nothing human foreign to me," excited, it is said, the
applause of the Roman spectators. But these were mere gleams,
extinguished soon by the general current of thought. It was the pale
dawn of the idea of humanity. Whence came the day?

I will limit the question by defining it. The idea of humanity is the
idea of the worth and consequently of the rights of each individual man.
It is the idea of liberty; not of liberty interpreted by passion and
selfishness as the inauguration of the license which violates right, but
of liberty interpreted by reason and conscience as the limit which the
action of each man encounters in the right of his neighbor. We are not
speaking here of the equality of political rights, which is not always
a guarantee of veritable liberty. We are speaking of a social condition
such that man, in the exercise of his faculties, in the manifestation of
his thoughts, in his efforts for the causes which he loves, so long as
he does not violate the rights of others, does not meet with an
arbitrary power to arrest him. Still farther to limit our subject, we
shall speak of the most important manifestation of that liberty--liberty
of conscience, of which religious liberty is the most ordinary and most
complete manifestation. This is only one of the points of the subject,
but it is a point which in reality supposes and includes all the rest.
This liberty--whence does it come?

It does not come from paganism. Paganism, with its national religions,
could only produce fanaticism or doubt. Each people having its own
particular religion, to exterminate the foreigner was to serve the cause
of the gods of the country. A war-cry descended from the Olympus of each
several nation--that Olympus which the gods quitted, in case of need, to
take part in the quarrels of men. Did reason perceive the nothingness of
these national divinities? Then scepticism appeared. The idea of the
supreme God being unsettled with all, and wholly obscured for the
crowd, when men ceased to believe in the gods of the nation, they lost
all belief whatsoever. For this cause doubt prevailed so widely at the
decline of the ancient world. Those pantheons in which all religions
were received, welcomed, protected, are the ever-memorable temples of
scepticism. Now you know what voice made itself heard, when the ancient
civilization was enfeebled by the spirit of doubt: "Hen