e Christian brotherhood,"[174] with a central
committee sitting in London; with subscribed funds, regularly audited, for
the purchase of Testaments and tracts; and with paid agents, who travelled
up and down the country to distribute them. Some of the poorer clergy
belonged to the society;[175] and among the city merchants there were many
well inclined to it, and who, perhaps, attended its meetings "by night,
secretly, for fear of the Jews." But, as a rule, "property and influence"
continued to hold aloof in the usual haughty style, and the pioneers of the
new opinions had yet to win their way along a scorched and blackened path
of suffering, before the State would consent to acknowledge them. We think
bitterly of these things, and yet we are but quarrelling with what is
inevitable from the constitution of the world. New doctrines ever gain
readiest hearing among the common people; not only because the interests of
the higher classes are usually in some degree connected with the
maintenance of existing institutions; but because ignorance is itself a
protection against the many considerations which embarrass the judgment of
the educated. The value of a doctrine cannot be determined on its own
apparent merits by men whose habits of mind are settled in other forms;
while men of experience know well that out of the thousands of theories
which rise in the fertile soil below them, it is but one here and one there
which grows to maturity; and the precarious chances of possible vitality,
where the opposite probabilities are so enormous, oblige them to discourage
and repress opinions which threaten to disturb established order, or which,
by the rules of existing beliefs, imperil the souls of those who entertain
them. Persecution has ceased among ourselves, because we do not any more
believe that want of theoretic orthodoxy in matters of faith is necessarily
fraught with the tremendous consequences which once were supposed to be
attached to it. If, however, a school of Thugs were to rise among us,
making murder a religious service; if they gained proselytes, and the
proselytes put their teaching in execution, we should speedily begin again
to persecute opinion. What teachers of Thuggism would appear to ourselves,
the teachers of heresy actually appeared to Sir Thomas More, only being as
much more hateful as the eternal death of the soul is more terrible than
the single and momentary separation of it from the body. There is, I think,