[52] a millennium in which reason was enchained, thought was enslaved, and knowledge made no progress.

During the two centuries in which they had been a forbidden sect the Christians had claimed toleration on the ground that religious belief is voluntary and not a thing which can be enforced.  When their faith became the predominant creed and had the power of the State behind it, they abandoned this view.  They embarked on the hopeful enterprise of bringing about a complete uniformity in men’s opinions on the mysteries of the universe, and began a more or less definite policy of coercing thought.  This policy was adopted by Emperors and Governments partly on political grounds; religious divisions, bitter as they were, seemed dangerous to the unity of the State.  But the fundamental principle lay in the doctrine that salvation is to be found exclusively in the Christian Church.  The profound conviction that those who did not believe in its doctrines would be damned eternally, and that God punishes theological error as if it were the most heinous of crimes, led naturally to persecution.  It was a duty to impose on men the only true doctrine, seeing that their own eternal interests were at stake, and to hinder errors from spreading.  Heretics were more

[53] than ordinary criminals and the pains that man could inflict on them were as nothing to the tortures awaiting them in hell.  To rid the earth of men who, however virtuous, were, through their religious errors, enemies of the Almighty, was a plain duty.  Their virtues were no excuse.  We must remember that, according to the humane doctrine of the Christians, pagan, that is, merely human, virtues were vices, and infants who died unbaptized passed the rest of time in creeping on the floor of hell.  The intolerance arising from such views could not but differ in kind and intensity from anything that the world had yet witnessed.

Besides the logic of its doctrines, the character of its Sacred Book must also be held partly accountable for the intolerant principles of the Christian Church.  It was unfortunate that the early Christians had included in their Scripture the Jewish writings which reflect the ideas of a low stage of civilization and are full of savagery.  It would be difficult to say how much harm has been done, in corrupting the morals of men, by the precepts and examples of inhumanity, violence, and bigotry which the reverent reader of the Old Testament, implicitly believing in its inspiration, is bound to approve.  It furnished an armoury for the theory of

[54] persecution.  The truth is that Sacred Books are an obstacle to moral and intellectual progress, because they consecrate the ideas of a given epoch, and its customs, as divinely appointed.  Christianity, by adopting books of a long past age, placed in the path of human development a particularly nasty stumbling-block.  It may occur to one to wonder how history might have been altered —­altered it surely would have been—­if the Christians had cut Jehovah out of their programme and, content with the New Testament, had rejected the inspiration of the Old.