whom they had come. This, then, was an
appeal to faith.

The second main argument was addressed to reason. Persecution, as all
enlightened persons confessed, was the method of a majority of savages
who desired to force a set of opinions upon a minority who did not
spontaneously share them. Now the peculiar malevolence of persecution in
the past lay, not in the employment of force, but in the abuse of it.
That any one kingdom should dictate religious opinions to a minority of
its members was an intolerable tyranny, for no one State possessed the
right to lay down universal laws, the contrary to which might be held by
its neighbour. This, however, disguised, was nothing else than the
Individualism of Nations, a heresy even more disastrous to the
commonwealth of the world than the Individualism of the Individual. But
with the arrival of the universal community of interests the whole
situation was changed. The single personality of the human race had
succeeded to the incoherence of divided units, and with that
consummation--which might be compared to a coming of age, an entirely
new set of rights had come into being. The human race was now a single
entity with a supreme responsibility towards itself; there were no
longer any private rights at all, such as had certainly existed, in the
period previous to this. Man now possessed dominion over every cell
which composed His Mystical Body, and where any such cell asserted
itself to the detriment of the Body, the rights of the whole were
unqualified.

And there was no religion but one that claimed the equal rights of
universal jurisdiction--and that the Catholic. The sects of the East,
while each retained characteristics of its own, had yet found in the New
Man the incarnation of their ideals, and had therefore given in their
allegiance to the authority of the whole Body of whom He was Head. But
the very essence of the Catholic Religion was treason to the very idea
of man. Christians directed their homage to a supposed supernatural
Being who was not only--so they claimed--outside of the world but
positively transcended it. Christians, then--leaving aside the mad fable
of the Incarnation, which might very well be suffered to die of its own
folly--deliberately severed themselves from that Body of which by human
generation they had been made members. They were as mortified limbs
yielding themselves to the domination of an outside force other than
that which was their only life, a