Destroy credit, and you ruin
commerce; destroy all faith in religious honesty and you ruin something
of infinitely more importance than commerce; ideas should surely be
preserved as carefully as cotton from the poisonous influence of a
varnish intended to fit them for public consumption. "The time is come,"
says Mr. Mill in his autobiography, "in which it is the duty of all
qualified persons to speak their minds about popular religious beliefs."
The reason which he assigns is that they would thus destroy the "vulgar
prejudice" that unbelief is connected with bad qualities of head and
heart. It is, I venture to remark, still more important to destroy the
belief of sceptics themselves that in these matters a system of pious
frauds is creditable or safe. Effeminating and corrupting as all
equivocation comes to be in the long run, there are other evils behind.
Who can see without impatience the fearful waste of good purpose and
noble aspiration caused by our reticence at a time when it is of primary
importance to turn to account all the forces which make for the
elevation of mankind? How much intellect and zeal runs to waste in the
spasmodic effort of good men to cling _to_ the last fragments of
decaying systems, to galvanize dead formulae into some dim semblance of
life! Society will not improve as it might when those who should be
leaders of progress are staggering backward and forward with their eyes
passionately reverted to the past. Nay, we shall never be duly sensitive
to the miseries and cruelties which make the world a place of torture
for so many, so long as men are encouraged in the name of religion to
look for a remedy, not in fighting against surrounding evils, but in
cultivating aimless contemplations of an imaginary ideal. Much of our
popular religion seems to be expressly directed to deaden our sympathies
with our fellow-men by encouraging an indolent optimism; our thoughts of
the other world are used in many forms as an opiate to drug our minds
with indifference to the evils of this; and the last word of half our
preachers is, dream rather than work.

To the other question, Why deprive men of their religious consolations?
I must make a rather longer reply. In the first place, I must observe
that the burden of proof does not rest with me. If any one should tell
me explicitly, a certain dogma is false, but it is better not to destroy
it, I would not reply summarily that he is preaching grossly immoral
doctrine