Suppose him in taking his stand to have taken up some social faith that
for him has promise of better things. He will find his new creed
surrounded by its own swarm of prejudices, and if he refuse to worship
every fetish of the free-thinker, declaring that this stands to him for
a certain definite, beautiful thing, and fighting for it, he will find
himself denied and scouted by his new friends. He may find himself often
in company with some supposed enemies. He will surely need in his
sincere attitude to life a freedom of mind that is not a name merely but
a positive virtue that demands of him more than denunciation of
obscurantism, the recognition of a personal duty and the justification
of personal works.


VII


The religious prejudice will be no less hard to kill. Indiscriminate
denunciation of unbelievers as wicked men serves no good purpose and
leads nowhere. There are wicked men on all sides. Our standard must be
one that will distinguish the sincere men on all sides; and our loyalty
to our particular creeds must be shown in our lives and labours, not in
the reviling of the infidel. We are justified in casting out the
hypocrite from every camp, and when we come to this task we can be sure
only of the hypocrites in our own; and we should lay it as an injunction
on all bodies to purge themselves. The burden will be laid on all--not
one surely of which men can complain--that they shall prove their
principles in action and lay their prejudices by. Christians might well
find exemplars in the early martyrs, those who for their principles went
so readily to the lions. One may anticipate the complacent rejoinder:
"This is not so exacting an age; men are not asked to die for religion