lf.

As to practice--a righteous life will not make a man 'popular.' And as
for 'opinions'--earnest religious opinions of any sort are distasteful.
Not the profession of them, but the reality of them--especially those
which seem in any way new or strange--make the average man angrily
intolerant of an earnest Christianity which takes its creed seriously
and insists on testing conventional life by it. Indolence,
self-complacency, and inborn conservatism join forces in resenting the
presence of such inconvenient enthusiasts, who upset everything and want
to 'turn the world upside down.'

'The moping owl doth to the moon complain
Of such as, wandering near her ivy tower.
Molest her ancient, solitary reign.'

The seeds of the persecuting temper are in human nature, and they
germinate in the storms which Christianity brings with it.

3. The phases vary according to circumstances.

We have not to look for the more severe and gross kinds of persecution.

The tendency of the age is to visit no man with penalties for his
belief, but to allow the utmost freedom of thought.

The effect of Christianity upon popular morality has been to bring men
up towards the standard of Christ's righteousness.

The long proclamation of Christian truth in England has the effect of
making mere profession of it a perfectly safe and even proper thing.

But the antagonism remains at bottom the same.

Let a man earnestly accept even the creeds of established religion and
live by them, and he will find that out. Let him seek to proclaim and
enforce some of those truths of Christianity whose bearing upon social
and economical and ecclesiastical questions is but partially understood.
Let him set up and stick to a high standard of Christian morality and
see what comes of it, in business, say, or in social life.

'All that will live godly will suffer persecution.'

4. The present forms are perhaps not less hard to bear than the old
ones.

They are, no doubt, very small in contrast with the lions in the arena
or the fires of Smithfield. The curled lip, the civil scorn, the
alienation of some whose good opinion we would fain have, or, if we
stand in some public position, the poisonous slanders of the press, and
the contumacious epithets, are trivial but very real tokens of dislike.
We have the assassin's tongue instead of the assassin's dagger. But yet
such things may call for as much heroism as braving a rack, and the
spirit that