faction would render millions of
mankind miserable, some millions of the race coexistent with themselves,
and many millions in their succession, without knowing or so much as
pretending to ascertain the doctrines of their own school, (in which
there is much of the lash and nothing of the lesson,) the errors which
the persons in such a faction fall into are not those that are natural
to human imbecility, nor is the least mixture of mistaken kindness to
mankind an ingredient in the severities they inflict. The whole is
nothing but pure and perfect malice. It is, indeed, a perfection in that
kind belonging to beings of an higher order than man, and to them we
ought to leave it.

This kind of persecutors without zeal, without charity, know well enough
that religion, to pass by all questions of the truth or falsehood of any
of its particular systems, (a matter I abandon to the theologians on all
sides,) is a source of great comfort to us mortals, in this our short,
but tedious journey through the world. They know, that, to enjoy this
consolation, men must believe their religion upon some principle or
other, whether of education, habit, theory, or authority. When men are
driven from any of those principles on which they have received
religion, without embracing with the same assurance and cordiality some
other system, a dreadful void is left in their minds, and a terrible
shook is given to their morals. They lose their guide, their comfort,
their hope. None but the most cruel and hardhearted of men, who had
banished all natural tenderness from their minds, such as those beings
of iron, the atheists, could bring themselves to any persecution like
this. Strange it is, but so it is, that men, driven by force from their
habits in one mode of religion, have, by contrary habits, under the same
force, often quietly settled in another. They suborn their reason to
declare in favor of their necessity. Man and his conscience cannot
always be at war. If the first races have not been able to make a
pacification between the conscience and the convenience, their
descendants come generally to submit to the violence of the laws,
without violence to their minds. As things stood formerly, they
possessed a _positive_ scheme of direction and of consolation. In this
men may acquiesce. The harsh methods in use with the old class of
persecutors were to make converts, not apostates only. If they
perversely hated other sects and factions, they loved t