gnorant age an ignorant man will be sure to inflict. How
entirely this is verified by experience, we may see in studying the
history of religious persecution. To punish even a single man for his
religious tenets is assuredly a crime of the deepest dye; but to punish
a large body of men, to persecute an entire sect, to attempt to
extirpate opinions which, growing out of the state of society in which
they arise, are themselves a manifestation of the marvelous and
luxuriant fertility of the human mind,--to do this is not only one of
the most pernicious, but one of the most foolish acts that can possibly
be conceived. Nevertheless it is an undoubted fact that an overwhelming
majority of religious persecutors have been men of the purest
intentions, of the most admirable and unsullied morals. It is impossible
that this should be otherwise. For they are not bad-intentioned men who
seek to enforce opinions which they believe to be good. Still less are
they bad men who are so regardless of temporal considerations as to
employ all the resources of their power, not for their own benefit, but
for the purpose of propagating a religion which they think necessary to
the future happiness of mankind. Such men as these are not bad, they are
only ignorant; ignorant of the nature of truth, ignorant of the
consequences of their own acts. But in a moral point of view their
motives are unimpeachable. Indeed, it is the very ardor of their
sincerity which warms them into persecution. It is the holy zeal by
which they are fired that quickens their fanaticism into a deadly
activity. If you can impress any man with an absorbing conviction of the
supreme importance of some moral or religious doctrine; if you can make
him believe that those who reject that doctrine are doomed to eternal
perdition; if you then give that man power, and by means of his
ignorance blind him to the ulterior consequences of his own act,--he
will infallibly persecute those who deny his doctrine; and the extent of
his persecution will be regulated by the extent of his sincerity.
Diminish the sincerity, and you will diminish the persecution; in other
words, by weakening the virtue you may check the evil. This is a truth
of which history furnishes such innumerable examples, that to deny it
would be not only to reject the plainest and most conclusive arguments,
but to refuse the concurrent testimony of every age. I will merely
select two cases, which, from the entire difference i