at only by
converting to a better religion, which it is his duty to embrace, even
though it were attended with all those penalties from whence in reality
it delivers him: if he suffers, it is his own fault; _volenti non fit
injuria_.

I shall be very short, without being, I think, the less satisfactory, in
my answer to these topics, because they never can be urged from a
conviction of their validity, and are, indeed, only the usual and
impotent struggles of those who are unwilling to abandon a practice
which they are unable to defend. First, then, I observe, that, if the
principle of their final and beneficial intention be admitted as a just
ground for such proceedings, there never was, in the blamable sense of
the word, nor ever can be, such a thing as a religious persecution in
the world. Such an intention is pretended by all men,--who all not only
insist that their religion has the sanction of Heaven, but is likewise,
and for that reason, the best and most convenient to human society. All
religious persecution, Mr. Bayle well observes, is grounded upon a
miserable _petitio principii_. You are wrong, I am right; you must come
over to me, or you must suffer. Let me add, that the great inlet by
which a color for oppression has entered into the world is by one man's
pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another, and by
claiming a right to use what means he thinks proper in order to bring
him to a sense of it. It is the ordinary and trite sophism of
oppression. But there is not yet such a convenient ductility in the
human understanding as to make us capable of being persuaded that men
can possibly mean the ultimate good of the whole society by rendering
miserable for a century together the greater part of it,--or that any
one has such a reversionary benevolence as seriously to intend the
remote good of a late posterity, who can give up the present enjoyment
which every honest man must have in the happiness of his contemporaries.
Everybody is satisfied that a conservation and secure enjoyment of our
natural rights is the great and ultimate purpose of civil society, and
that therefore all forms whatsoever of government are only good as they
are subservient to that purpose to which they are entirely subordinate.
Now to aim at the establishment of any form of government by sacrificing
what is the substance of it, to take away or at least to suspend the
rights of Nature in order to an approved system for the prot