people everywhere; who thus show that they look upon religion, not as a
matter of reasoned conviction, but merely as a belief inoculated in
childhood, before any test can be applied. And that they are right in
their view of religion is also obvious from the way in which not only
the masses, who are blindly credulous, but also the clergy of every
religion, who, as such, have faithfully and zealously studied its
sources, foundations, dogmas and disputed points, cleave as a body to
the religion of their particular country; consequently for a minister of
one religion or confession to go over to another is the rarest thing in
the world. The Catholic clergy, for example, are fully convinced of the
truth of all the tenets of their Church, and so are the Protestant
clergy of theirs, and both defend the principles of their creeds with
like zeal. And yet the conviction is governed merely by the country
native to each; to the South German ecclesiastic the truth of the
Catholic dogma is quite obvious, to the North German, the Protestant. If
then, these convictions are based on objective reasons, the reasons must
be climatic, and thrive, like plants, some only here, some only there.
The convictions of those who are thus locally convinced are taken on
trust and believed by the masses everywhere.

_Demopheles_. Well, no harm is done, and it doesn't make any real
difference. As a fact, Protestantism is more suited to the North,
Catholicism to the South.

_Philalethes_. So it seems. Still I take a higher standpoint, and keep
in view a more important object, the progress, namely, of the knowledge
of truth among mankind. And from this point of view, it is a terrible
thing that, wherever a man is born, certain propositions are inculcated
in him in earliest youth, and he is assured that he may never have any
doubts about them, under penalty of thereby forfeiting eternal