heresy.

The church had succeeded in implanting in the minds of its votaries one
opinion of enormous value in its struggle for power. Originally and
properly an association for the practice and spreading of religion, the
corporation had succeeded in making itself an object of worship. One
great reason why atheism took root in France was the impossibility,
induced by long habit, of distinguishing between religion and
Catholicism, and of conceiving that the one may exist without the other.
The by-laws of the church had become as sacred as the primary duties of
piety; and the injunction to refrain from meat on Fridays was
indistinguishable by most Catholics, in point of obligation, from the
injunction to love the Lord their God.

The Protestant churches which separated themselves from the Church of
Rome in the sixteenth century carried with them much of the intolerant
spirit of the original body. It is one of the commonplace sneers of the
unreflecting to say that religious toleration has always been the dogma
of the weaker party. The saying, if it were true, which it is not, yet
would not be especially sagacious. Toleration, like other things, has
been most sought by those whose need of it was greatest. But they have
not always recognized its value. It was no small step in the progress of
the human mind that was taken when men came to look on religious
toleration as desirable or possible. That the state might treat with
equal favor all forms of worship was an opinion hardly accepted by wise
and liberal-minded men in the eighteenth century. It may be that the
fiery contests of the Reformation were still too near in those days to
let perfect peace be safe or profitable.

Yet religious toleration was making its way in men's minds. Cautiously,