Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series by Frederick W. Robertson
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page 17 of 308 (05%)
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malevolent gossip. For years the religious press has denounced them
with a vehemence as virulent, but happily more impotent than that of the Inquisition. There has been an anguish and an inward struggle little suspected, endured by men who felt themselves outcasts in their own society, and naturally looked for a home elsewhere. We congratulate ourselves that the days of persecution are gone by; but persecution is that which affixes penalties upon _views held_, instead of upon _life led_. Is persecution _only_ fire and sword? But suppose a man of sensitive feeling says, The sword is less sharp to me than the slander: fire is less intolerable than the refusal of sympathy! Now let us bring this home; you rejoice that the faggot and the stake are given up;--_you_ never persecuted--you leave that to the wicked Church of Rome. Yes, you never burned a human being alive--you never clapped your hands as the death-shriek proclaimed that the lion's fang had gone home into the most vital part of the victim's frame; but did you never rob him of his friends?--gravely shake your head and oracularly insinuate that he was leading souls to hell?--chill the affections of his family?--take from him his good name? Did you never with delight see his Church placarded as the Man of Sin, and hear the platform denunciations which branded it with the spiritual abominations of the Apocalypse? Did you never find a malicious pleasure in repeating all the miserable gossip with which religious slander fastened upon his daily acts, his words, and even his uncommunicated thoughts? Did you never forget that for a man to "work out his own salvation with fear and trembling" is a matter difficult enough to be laid upon a human spirit, without intruding into the most sacred department of another's life--that namely, which lies between |
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