canism,
though it be not in establishment, is in aristocracy, and its shadow,
which is called snobbishness. All I assert here is that the Churches
are not now leaning heavily on their political establishment; they are
not using heavily the secular arm. Almost everywhere their legal
tithes have been modified, their legal boards of control have been
mixed. They may still employ tyranny, and worse tyranny: I am not
considering that. They are not specially using that special tyranny
which consists in using the government.

The thing that really is trying to tyrannise through government is
Science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science.
And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the
creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that
really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statutes, and spread not by
pilgrims but by policemen--that creed is the great but disputed
system of thought which began with Evolution and has ended in
Eugenics. Materialism is really our established Church; for the
Government will really help it to persecute its heretics. Vaccination,
in its hundred years of experiment, has been disputed almost as much
as baptism in its approximate two thousand. But it seems quite natural
to our politicians to enforce vaccination; and it would seem to them
madness to enforce baptism.

I am not frightened of the word "persecution" when it is attributed to
the churches; nor is it in the least as a term of reproach that I
attribute it to the men of science. It is as a term of legal fact. If
it means the imposition by the police of a widely disputed theory,
incapable of final proof--then our priests are not now persecuting,
but our doctors are. The imposition of such dogmas constitutes a State
Church--in an older and stronger sense than any that can be applied to
any supernatural Church to-day. There are still places where the
religious minority is forbidden to assemble or to teach in this way or
that; and yet more where it is excluded from this or that public post.
But I cannot now recall any place where it is compelled by the
criminal law to go through the rite of the official religion. Even the
Young Turks did not insist on all Macedonians being circumcised.

Now here we find ourselves confronted with an amazing fact. When, in
the past, opinions so arguable have been enforced by State violence,
it has been at the instigation of fanatics who held them fo