d.'

Whatever may be urged in defence of such execrable duplicity, there can
be no question as to its anti-progressive tendency. The majority of men
are fools, and if such 'sensible' politicians as our Doctor and the
double doctrinising persecuting ecclesiastics, for whose portraits we
are indebted to Mosheim and Beausobre, shall have the teaching of them,
fools they are sure to remain. Men who dare not be 'mentally faithful'
to themselves may obstruct, but cannot advance the interests of truth.
Colonel Thompson is right. In legislation, in law, in all the relations
of life, we want _honesty_, not piety. There is plenty of piety, and to
spare, but of honesty--sterling, bold, uncompromising honesty--even the
best regulated societies can boast a very small stock. The men best
qualified to raise the veil under which truth lies concealed from vulgar
gaze, are precisely the men who fear to do it. Oh, shame upon ye
self-styled philosophers, who in your closets laugh at 'our holy
religion,' and in your churches do them reverence. Were your bosoms
warmed by one spark of generous wisdom, _silence_ on the question of
religion would be broken, the multitude cease to _believe_, and
imposters to _triumph_. But the desire to enlighten others is lost in
regard for yourselves, and what Mrs. Grundy may say, is sufficient to
frighten ye from the enunciation truth.

Is superstition no evil? Is there nothing hateful, nothing against which
unceasing war should be waged, in the degradation of those unhappy
persons who worship idols of their own imagination? Can error be fraught
with good and truth with evil, that we should shrink from doing justice
to both? Everywhere are learnedly ignorant or basely cunning men, who
would scare us from dealing with religious error, as all error deserves
to be dealt with, by high-sounding jargon about the danger of freeing
vulgar minds from the wholesome restraints of certain antiquated
beliefs. Themselves essentially vulgar by habit and in feeling, their
estimate of human tendencies is of the meanest, the most grovelling
description. Measuring the _chaff_ of other men by their own bushel,
they arrive at the pious but false conclusion that without fear of God
there can be no genuine love of man, and that without faith in some one
of our five hundred and odd true religions, all the thoughts of our
hearts would be evil continually. They insist upon it that the 'absolute
Atheist,' if virtuous, is so by acciden