right, should be dealt with
as a blasphemer: as, indeed, guilty of the unpardonable sin against the
Holy Ghost. If the penalty were death, it would rid us at once of that
scourge of humanity, the amateur Pope. As an Irish Protestant, I raise
the cry of No Popery with hereditary zest. We are overrun with Popes.
From curates and governesses, who may claim a sort of professional
standing, to parents and uncles and nurserymaids and school teachers
and wiseacres generally, there are scores of thousands of human insects
groping through our darkness by the feeble phosphorescence of their own
tails, yet ready at a moment's notice to reveal the will of God on every
possible subject; to explain how and why the universe was made (in my
youth they added the exact date) and the circumstances under which
it will cease to exist; to lay down precise rules of right and wrong
conduct; to discriminate infallibly between virtuous and vicious
character; and all this with such certainty that they are prepared to
visit all the rigors of the law, and all the ruinous penalties of social
ostracism on people, however harmless their actions maybe who venture
to laugh at their monstrous conceit or to pay their assumptions the
extravagant compliment of criticizing them. As to children, who shall
say what canings and birchings and terrifyings and threats of hell fire
and impositions and humiliations and petty imprisonings and sendings
to bed and standing in corners and the like they have suffered because
their parents and guardians and teachers knew everything so much better
than Socrates or Solon?

It is this ignorant uppishness that does the mischief. A stranger on the
planet might expect that its grotesque absurdity would provoke enough
ridicule to cure it; but unfortunately quite the contrary happens.
Just as our ill health delivers us into the hands of medical quacks and
creates a passionate demand for impudent pretences that doctors can
cure the diseases they themselves die of daily, so our ignorance and
helplessness set us clamoring for spiritual and moral quacks who pretend
that they can save our souls from their own damnation. If a doctor were
to say to his patients, "I am familiar with your symptoms, because I
have seen other people in your condition; and I will bring the very
little knowledge we have to your treatment; but except in that very
shallow sense I dont know what is the matter with you; and I cant
undertake to cure you," he woul