r all the plainer, as
well as easier, a duty not to conceal such dissent. What we have been
saying comes to this. If a believer finds that his son, for instance,
has ceased to believe, he no longer has this disbelief thrust upon him
in gross and irreverent forms. Nor does he any longer suppose that the
unbelieving son must necessarily be a profligate. And moreover, in
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, he no longer supposes that infidels,
of his own family or acquaintance at any rate, will consume for eternal
ages in lakes of burning marl.

Let us add another consideration. One reason why so many persons are
really shocked and pained by the avowal of heretical opinions is the
very fact that such avowal is uncommon. If unbelievers and doubters were
more courageous, believers would be less timorous. It is because they
live in an enervating fool's paradise of seeming assent and conformity,
that the breath of an honest and outspoken word strikes so eager and
nipping on their sensibilities. If they were not encouraged to suppose
that all the world is of their own mind, if they were forced out of that
atmosphere of self-indulgent silences and hypocritical reserves, which
is systematically poured round them, they would acquire a robuster
mental habit. They would learn to take dissents for what they are worth.
They would be led either to strengthen or to discard their own
opinions, if the dissents happened to be weighty or instructive; either
to refute or neglect such dissents as should be ill-founded or
insignificant. They will remain valetudinarians, so long as a curtain of
compromise shelters them from the real belief of those of their
neighbours who have ventured to use their minds with some measure of
independence. A very brief contact with people who, when the occasion
comes, do not shrink from saying what they think, is enough to modify
that excessive liability to be shocked at truth-speaking, which is only
so common because truth-speaking itself is so unfamiliar.

Now, however great the pain inflicted by the avowal of unbelief, it
seems to the present writer that one relationship in life, and one only,
justifies us in being silent where otherwise it would be right to speak.
This relationship is that between child and parents. Those parents are
wisest who train their sons and daughters in the utmost liberty both of
thought and speech; who do not instill dogmas into them, but inculcate
upon them the sovereign importance