the heaviness of an oppressor's hand, and striving to find relief from
unjust burdens. As if any nation endowed with enough of the spirit of
independence to assent to the right of resistance when offered to them
as a speculative theorem, would not infallibly be led by the same spirit
to assert the right without the speculative theorem. That so acute a
head as Hume's should have failed to perceive these very plain
considerations, and that he should moreover have perpetrated the
absurdity of declaring the right of resistance, in the same breath in
which he declares the laudableness of keeping it a secret, only allows
how carefully a man need steer after he has once involved himself in the
labyrinths of Economy.[18]

In religion the unreasonableness of imposing a similar cautious silence
is not yet fully established, nor the vicious effects of practising it
clearly recognised. In these high matters an amount of economy and
management is held praiseworthy, which in any other subject would be
universally condemned as cowardly and ignoble. Indeed the preliminary
stage has scarcely been reached--the stage in which public opinion
grants to every one the unrestricted right of shaping his own beliefs,
independently of those of the people who surround him. Any woman, for
instance, suspected of having cast behind her the Bible and all
practices of devotion and the elementary articles of the common creed,
would be distrustfully regarded even by those who wink at the same kind
of mental boldness in men. Nay, she would be so regarded even by some of
the very men who have themselves discarded as superstition what they
still wish women to retain for law and gospel. So long as any class of
adults are effectually discouraged in the free use of their minds upon
the most important subjects, we are warranted in saying that the era of
free thought, which naturally precedes the era of free speech, is still
imperfectly developed.