of persons professing these religions have never been anything
but simple moralists. The respectable Englishman who is a
Christian because he was born in Clapham would be a Mohammedan
for the cognate reason if he had been born in Constantinople. He
has never willingly tolerated immorality. He did not adopt any
innovation until it had become moral; and then he adopted it, not
on its merits, but solely because it had become moral. In doing
so he never realized that it had ever been immoral: consequently
its early struggles taught him no lesson; and he has opposed the
next step in human progress as indignantly as if neither manners,
customs, nor thought had ever changed since the beginning of the
world. Toleration must be imposed on him as a mystic and painful
duty by his spiritual and political leaders, or he will condemn
the world to stagnation, which is the penalty of an inflexible
morality.


WHAT TOLERATION MEANS

This must be done all the more arbitrarily because it is not
possible to make the ordinary moral man understand what
toleration and liberty really mean. He will accept them verbally
with alacrity, even with enthusiasm, because the word toleration
has been moralized by eminent Whigs; but what he means by
toleration is toleration of doctrines that he considers
enlightened, and, by liberty, liberty to do what he considers
right: that is, he does not mean toleration or liberty at all;
for there is no need to tolerate what appears enlightened or to
claim liberty to do what most people consider right.
Toleration and liberty have no sense or use except as