gue
terrors which often drive the victim to insanity, and it causes
remorse for harmless enjoyments.[621] Religion injures society by
creating antipathies against unbelievers, and in a less degree against
heretics and nonconformists. It perverts public opinion by making
innocent actions blameable; by distorting the whole science of
morality and sanctioning the heterogeneous dictates of a certain blind
and unaccountable impulse called the 'moral instinct or
conscience.'[622] Morality becomes a 'mere catalogue of reigning
sentiments,' because it has cast away the standard of utility. A
special aversion to improvement is generated, because whatever
changes our conceptions of the 'sequences of phenomena' is supposed to
break the divine 'laws of nature.' 'Unnatural' becomes a
'self-justifying' epithet forbidding any proposed change of conduct,
which will counteract the 'designs of God.' Religion necessarily
injures intellectual progress. It disjoins belief from its only safe
ground, experience. The very basis, the belief in an inscrutable and
arbitrary power, sanctions supernatural or 'extra-experimental'
beliefs of all kinds. You reject in the case of miracles all the tests
applicable to ordinary instruction, and appeal to trial by ordeal
instead of listening to witnesses. Instead of taking the trouble to
plough and sow, you expect to get a harvest by praying to an
inscrutable Being. You marry without means, because you hold that God
never sends a child without sending food for it to eat. Meanwhile you
suborn 'unwarranted belief' by making belief a matter of reward and
penalty. It is made a duty to dwell upon the arguments upon one side
without attending to those upon the other, and 'the weaker the
evidence the greater the merit in believing.'[623] The temper is
depraved not only by the antipathies generated, but by the 'fitful and
intermittent character' of the inducements to conduct.[624]

The final result of all this is still more serious. It is that
religion, besides each separate mischief, 'subsidises a standing army
for the perpetuation of all the rest.'[625] The priest gains power as
a 'wonder-worker,' who knows how to propitiate the invisible Being,
and has a direct interest in 'depraving the intellect,' cherishing
superstition, surrounding himself with mysteries, representing the
will of the Deity as arbitrary and capricious, and forming an
organised 'array of human force and fraud.'[626] The priesthood sets
up a