ankind, you alone take an interest.

To commence with what is of most moment, you may rest assured that what
you said in your last letter about religion has had my most earnest
attention. I am sorry that I have not got it by me to refer to (I
lent it to Charlie), but I think I have the contents in my head. It is
notorious, as you say, that an unbeliever may be as bigoted as any of
the orthodox, and that a man may be very dogmatic in his opposition to
dogma. Such men are the real enemies of free thought. If anything could
persuade me to turn traitor to my reason, it would, for example, be
the blasphemous and foolish pictures displayed in some of the agnostic
journals.

But every movement has its crowd of camp followers, who straggle and
scatter. We are like a comet, bright at the head but tailing away into
mere gas behind. However, every man may speak for himself, and I do
not feel that your charge comes home to me. I am only bigoted against
bigotry, and that I hold to be as legitimate as violence to the violent.
When one considers what effect the perversion of the religious instinct
has had during the history of the world; the bitter wars, Christian and
Mahomedan, Catholic and Protestant; the persecutions, the torturings,
the domestic hatreds, the petty spites, with ALL creeds equally
blood-guilty, one cannot but be amazed that the concurrent voice of
mankind has not placed bigotry at the very head of the deadly sins.
It is surely a truism to say that neither smallpox nor the plague have
brought the same misery upon mankind.

I cannot be bigoted, my dear boy, when I say from the bottom of my heart
that I respect every good Catholic and every good Protestant, and that
I recognise that each of these forms of faith has been a powerful
instrument in the hands of that inscrutable Providence which rules
all things. Just as in the course of history one finds that the most
far-reaching and admirable effects may proceed from a crime; so in
religion, although a creed be founded upon an entirely inadequate
conception of the Creator and His ways, it may none the less be the very
best practical thing for the people and age which have adopted it. But
if it is right for those to whom it is intellectually satisfying to
adopt it, it is equally so for those to whom it is not, to protest
against it, until by this process the whole mass of mankind gets
gradually leavened, and pushed a little further upon their slow upward
journey.

Ca