Truth, or believe it to be a mighty power. The Roman Emperors, who persecuted Christianity, not because they thought it false, but because it actively assailed the imperial institutions of religion, thought to support the empire thereby yet they only decreed its more violent concussion. It is the same with the great modern persecuting dynasty, the House of Hapsburg. The celebrated Emperor Charles V., the contemporary of Luther, when offended with the Pope, sent his generals to besiege and sack the city of Rome, shut up the Pope in the castle of St. Angelo, and ordered prayers to be offered for his deliverance. After thus sufficiently terrifying the Papal Power, and warning it never to take part against his temporal interests, he came forth as the great enemy of Protestantism, and bequeathed to his son Philip II. of Spain the advice to exterminate heresy by the sword. From that time onward the House of Hapsburg has, with short intervals, pursued this policy systematically. And with what result? Spain, under the terrors of the Inquisition, losing all freedom of expression and freedom of thought, was drained of spiritual vigour and of material strength, and sank into imbecility. The German branch of the Hapsburgs will decay similarly, if it be not violently arrested in its attempts to crush mind and free thought in its dominions. But, though it is always an erroneous policy to try to uphold falsehood by punishing those who expose it, the error of policy is less glaring and less shocking, when the religion which the rulers are seeking to uphold, has received hereditary veneration. In this point of view we are far more able to pardon persecution of Protestants by Catholics (especially when Protestantism was new and had gathered no veneration around it) than that of Protestants by Protestants. A new religious system, whether of Calvin or of Henry VIII., or of Elizabeth, cannot possibly have so taken up into itself the venerative faculties of a nation, that to attack it endangers the principle of veneration itself. Persecutions therefore which proceeded from early Protestantism were doubly detestable and unpardonable even when they did not go to all lengths of barbarity. Nevertheless, even here, the ruling power was liable to be led into a belief of the policy of persecution, which (if it were duly moderated) may be admitted to have been in some sense politic.

A rude and ignorant nation undoubtedly is apt to infer a man's guilt from his punishment. A Roman, the moment he heard that a man had been crucified, took for granted that he was a worth

less rascal. The French and Italians of the present day are not wholly free from an analogous sentiment. Three or four centuries ago, if an obscure person was subjected to ignominious punishment, however severe or cruel, for an offence against Church or State, instead of exciting pity or sympathy for him, it led rather to a shuddering at the enormity of his crime. This is in strict harmony with the fact, that nations primitively learn their morality from the legal punishments of crime. In proportion as a nation is deficient in thoughtfulness and earnestness, in proportion as it is in that puerile state which has no independent morality of its own, it is liable to be impressed against the man who is cruelly and unjustly punished. Thus an English or a Spanish rabble looked with horror and contempt at the criminal who was burnt alive for a disbelief in transubstantiation ; and the ruler who commanded the execution performed a deed temporarily politic, by eliciting that contempt and horror against the innovator. But his policy became at once self-convicted, when no longer obscure men, but those who were venerated for learning and goodness, assailed the established creed. To pass by this offence in them and punish it in others would be obvious folly. To punish them, if successful, would wither the roots of national strength and goodness (as has been done in Spain); and anything short of this would end in inducing hatred of the law as unjust and cruel. Thus in every way such policy was short-sighted; yet it was generally capable of deceiving statesmen who had no faith in truth and right.

I may remark, in passing, how it is that statesmen in particular are liable to the baneful delusion, generally known as the doctrine of Hobbes, that morality is an artificial structure, not growing up from within, but imposed from without; the creation of power, liable therefore to be rudely and suddenly overturned, if the authority which dictates it becomes despised. Of course, a ruler who believes this is apt to become a persecutor from sheer timidity. Statesmen, I think, are peculiarly liable to the delusion, because, more than other men, they are accustomed to survey, side by side, the superficial morality of many different nations. Superficially the contrast is often great, and veils the deep intrinsic harmonies of sentiment. When they find each nation to believe that which is established, and apparently only because it is established, they need some higher and maturer cultivation than routine can give, to save them from the inference that moral beliefs are essentially artificial and arbitrary.

To every narrow-minded thinker, in State or Church, acquaintance with foreign morality is dangerous and subversive. The Egyptian or Lacedæmonian dreaded foreign contact as a source of ruin so do modern political tyrants; in each case, because they do not desire truth and right, but desire only the maintenance of that imperfect or unjust system which exists. But it is neither by the individual man, nor by separate nations, that human morality is to be tested: collective humanity is its highest criterion accessible to us. In fact, human agreement alone distinguishes the sane in mind from the insane. And in this sense only did the wise men of antiquity intend a proverb, which is so often ill-quoted and ill-understood. Hesiod did not say, and Aristotle did not reiterate, that "The voice of the people is the voice of God." But he said: "The sentiment which many peoples (many nations) utter, perishes not, but is a voice of God." And while the comparison of our own national beliefs with those of other nations must generally show us some of our own weaknesses and unteach us some errors (just as insane men are sometimes cured, when each sees how ludicrous is the other's error), the very same comparison will infallibly add the strongest confirmation to all the fundamental faiths of the human heart. And on this the practical distinction turns between the Morality which it belongs rightly to the State to enforce, and the Religion which must be left free to the individual citizens. Morality is that system of lower truths and sentiments which has already attained the suffrage of mankind at large. Religion (as distinguished from it) is that which, as yet, only higher minds have reached. In strictness no sentiment or truth can be enforced, since its nature is inward; but even the outward actions connected with religion are unsuitable for State compulsion, because the truth has not yet the confirmation of the whole human race. Thus the State rightly punishes men for frauds, for violences, and for trading in vice ;-things which the conscience of man everywhere condemns: but the State cannot rightly or justly compel citizens to listen to religious teaching which they disapprove, or forbid their listening to that which they covet. For it cannot be pretended that there is as yet any practical agreement of human nature on what is especially called Religion. Men, ostensibly equally wise, differ enormously concerning it; and for the State to prejudge controversies of religion, and forbid free discussion, is as unjust, as pernicious, and as absurd, as to do the same with reference to history or physic. Problems which need the highest powers of mind and soul may be embroiled, and cannot be cleared up, by authoritative enforcements.

On the whole, I am brought to believe, that many modern Protestants and good lovers of freedom, fall into error, in laying down that "the State ought never to punish a vice because it is a vice, but only because it is a crime." They intend this as a protest for religious freedom, but miss the point of the matter. What, in fact, do they mean by crime in this sentence? Does not a vice become a crime, as soon as it is threatened by a degrading legal penalty? Some will say, No: but that a crime means a vice which hurts society, and that these only ought to be punished; and that the true formula is, "to punish, not vice, but vice which is hurtful to others." Then again I have to ask, what vice does not hurt society? Surely not Gambling only and Swindling, but Drunkenness and Fornication; nay, I may add, Idleness, Gluttony, Cowardice, Ingratitude, and Falsehood. These cannot indeed always be punished; either because they are undefinable to law, or because the judges would be too imperfect themselves; otherwise, any of them come beneath the legislator as fitly as Theft or a Soldier's Disobedience.

Allow me to illustrate a very old controversy by an anecdote concerning an English judge. It is related that in the last century a judge, before passing sentence on a man who was convicted of stealing a horse, asked him if he had anything further to say. "Please your honour," said the culprit, "I have only to say, I think it very hard if I am to be hanged for only stealing a horse." "Prisoner at the bar," replied the judge, "you will be hanged, not because you have stolen a horse, but in order that horses may not be stolen." Such a declaration from the judge, I believe, must everywhere excite popular indignation. If it were just, it would justify the well-known demand of "a man to hang," when a violent deed has been committed, without caring scrupulously whether we alighted on the real criminal. Yet a very slight change removes the paradox. The judge should have said: "not only because you have stolen a horse, but also in order that horses may not be stolen." Punishment is not mere retaliation for the past it mainly studies the future: yet its justification, as between the law and the criminal, is found in the moral guilt of the criminal. Law would indeed be a cold-blooded enormity, if it did not rest on moral right and wrong.

The religious freedom therefore to which we are entitled, is not a freedom to do whatever may be prescribed or permitted in (what we call) our religion; nor can it claim that the State shall not desire to promote the teaching of truth, whether truth of

astronomy, or of morality, or of religion. Wise rulers (as I believe) will desire the teachers of religion to teach freely, and will think it as absurd to dictate a creed in religion as in medicine; yet if, in deference to wide-spread prejudice, they go beyond the mark in imposing a creed on the public teachers, this is no restriction of my religious freedom. If I am unmolested by the law, and am subject to no exclusions on account of my belief, I find no personal grievance even if the ecclesiastical rules seem to me unwise. The religious freedom that we need, and on which we must insist, is, freedom to be as good, and as upright, and as wise, as our individual nature admits. But all freedom hangs together, and civil freedom eminently depends on public morality. The friends of freedom make a pernicious blunder, if they demand freedom in such a form as to promote public vice. An ignorant or dissolute people become the unscrupulous tools of tyranny. It has often been a policy with crafty rulers to undermine constitutional morality by promoting ruinous vices. The very opposite policy is ours. Everything that promotes our national virtue promotes our freedom. A high Tory government, a narrowminded court, if sound in moral intention and bent in promoting the virtue of the nation, will, in so far as they do promote it, lay the foundations unintentionally of a deeper and broader freedom, which will ere long sweep away all that was petty in their prejudices. But a ministry or court which calls itself popular, yet promotes debauchery, frivolity, recklessness, falsehood, and other vice, saps civil freedom, unless it soon encounter national indignation.

I therefore cannot but look on those as inadvertently playing into the enemy's hand, who, in zeal for what they call Religious Freedom, thwart every practical method of carrying moral and religious instruction home to the millions of the community. The Clergy of the Church, in demanding exclusive rights of teaching; the Dissenting Community, in refusing to them all facilities; alike seem to me to do mischief. If those who are, shall I say outside? or above? both these parties, were to lend their whole strength temporarily to reinforce the Church, so far as concerns the teaching of those who are in danger of sinking into an immorality which is essential slavery, I believe they would do a good work, even in the cause of true freedom. And as regards that particular side of religious freedom, to which you of late have given peculiar attention-I mean, our right to employ the hours of Sunday in the free contemplation of the objects of nature, and