its
sources, foundations, dogmas and disputed points, cleave as a body to
the religion of their particular country; consequently for a minister of
one religion or confession to go over to another is the rarest thing in
the world. The Catholic clergy, for example, are fully convinced of the
truth of all the tenets of their Church, and so are the Protestant
clergy of theirs, and both defend the principles of their creeds with
like zeal. And yet the conviction is governed merely by the country
native to each; to the South German ecclesiastic the truth of the
Catholic dogma is quite obvious, to the North German, the Protestant. If
then, these convictions are based on objective reasons, the reasons must
be climatic, and thrive, like plants, some only here, some only there.
The convictions of those who are thus locally convinced are taken on
trust and believed by the masses everywhere.

_Demopheles_. Well, no harm is done, and it doesn't make any real
difference. As a fact, Protestantism is more suited to the North,
Catholicism to the South.

_Philalethes_. So it seems. Still I take a higher standpoint, and keep
in view a more important object, the progress, namely, of the knowledge
of truth among mankind. And from this point of view, it is a terrible
thing that, wherever a man is born, certain propositions are inculcated
in him in earliest youth, and he is assured that he may never have any
doubts about them, under penalty of thereby forfeiting eternal
salvation; propositions, I mean, which affect the foundation of all our
other knowledge and accordingly determine for ever, and, if they are
false, distort for ever, the point of view from which our knowledge
starts; and as, further, the corollaries of these propositions touch the
entire system of our intellectual attainments at every point, the whole
of human knowledge is thoroughly adulterated by them. Evidence of this
is afforded by every literature; the most striking by that of the Middle
Age, but in a too considerable degree by that of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries. Look at even the first minds of all those epochs;
how paralyzed they are by false fundamental positions like these; how,
more especially, all insight into the true constitution and working of
nature is, as it were, blocked up. During the whole of the Christian
period Theism lies like a mountain on all intellectual, and chiefly on
all philosophical efforts, and arrests or stunts all progress. For the