ot have been more, as well as
sweeter, than that you have gained? But "it so forms my individuality
to be free!" Your individuality was given you by God, and in your race,
and if you have any to speak of, you will want no liberty. You will want
a den to work in, and peace, and light--no more,--in absolute need; if
more, in anywise, it will still not be liberty, but direction,
instruction, reproof, and sympathy. But if you have no individuality, if
there is no true character nor true desire in you, then you will indeed
want to be free. You will begin early, and, as a boy, desire to be a
man; and, as a man, think yourself as good as every other. You will
choose freely to eat, freely to drink, freely to stagger and fall,
freely, at last, to curse yourself and die. Death is the only real
freedom possible to us; and that is consummate freedom, permission for
every particle in the rotting body to leave its neighbor particle, and
shift for itself. You call it "corruption" in the flesh; but before it
comes to that, all liberty is an equal corruption in mind. You ask for
freedom of thought; but if you have not sufficient grounds for thought,
you have no business to think; and if you have sufficient grounds, you
have no business to think wrong. Only one thought is possible to you if
you are wise--your liberty is geometrically proportionate to your folly.

154. "But all this glory and activity of our age; what are they owing
to, but to freedom of thought?" In a measure, they are owing--what good
is in them--to the discovery of many lies, and the escape from the power
of evil. Not to liberty, but to the deliverance from evil or cruel
masters. Brave men have dared to examine lies which had long been
taught, not because they were free-thinkers, but because they were such
stern and close thinkers that the lie could no longer escape them. Of
course the restriction of thought, or of its expression, by persecution,
is merely a form of violence, justifiable or not, as other violence is,
according to the character of the persons against whom it is exercised,
and the divine and eternal laws which it vindicates or violates. We must
not burn a man alive for saying that the Athanasian creed is
ungrammatical, nor stop a bishop's salary because we are getting the
worst of an argument with him; neither must we let drunken men howl in
the public streets at night. There is much that is true in the part of
Mr. Mill's essay on Liberty