s, the foreheads of their persecutors more deeply than the
sheriff's hot iron did their own. If they lost their ears, they enjoyed
the satisfaction of making those of their oppressors tingle. Knowing
their persecutors to be in the wrong, they did not always inquire whether
they themselves had been entirely right, and had done no unrequired works
of supererogation by the way of "testimony" against their neighbors' mode
cf worship. And so from pillory and whipping-post, from prison and
scaffold, they sent forth their wail and execration, their miserere and
anathema, and the sound thereof has reached down to our day. May it
never wholly die away until, the world over, the forcing of conscience is
regarded as a crime against humanity and a usurpation of God's
prerogative. But abhorring, as we must, persecution under whatever
pretext it is employed, we are not, therefore, to conclude that all
persecutors were bad and unfeeling men. Many of their severities, upon
which we now look back with horror, were, beyond a question, the result
of an intense anxiety for the well-being of immortal souls, endangered by
the poison which, in their view, heresy was casting into the waters of
life. Coleridge, in one of the moods of a mind which traversed in
imagination the vast circle of human experience, reaches this point in
his Table-Talk. "It would require," says he, "stronger arguments than
any I have seen to convince me that men in authority have not a right,
involved in an imperative duty, to deter those under their control from
teaching or countenancing doctrines which they believe to be damnable,
and even to punish with death those who violate such prohibition." It
would not be very difficult for us to imagine a tender-hearted Inquisitor
of this stamp, stifling his weak compassion for the shrieking wretch
under bodily torment by his strong pity for souls in danger of perdition
from the sufferer's heresy. We all know with what satisfaction the
gentle-spirited Melanethon heard of the burning of Servetus, and with
what zeal he defended it. The truth is, the notion that an intellectual
recognition of certain dogmas is the essential condition of salvation
lies at the bottom of all intolerance in matters of religion. Under this
impression, men are too apt to forget that the great end of Christianity
is love, and that charity is its crowning virtue; they overlook the
beautiful significance of the parable of the heretic Samaritan an