From racks, indeed, and from all penalties directed against the persons, the property, and the liberty of heretics, the humane spirit of Mr. Gladstone shrinks with horror.  He only maintains that conformity to the religion of the state ought to be an indispensable qualification for office; and he would, unless we have greatly misunderstood him, think it his duty, if he had the power, to revive the Test Act, to enforce it rigorously, and to extend it to important classes who were formerly exempt from its operation.

This is indeed a legitimate consequence of his principles.  But why stop here?  Why not roast dissenters at slow fires?  All the general reasonings on which this theory rests evidently leads to sanguinary persecution.  If the propagation of religious truth be a principal end of government, as government; if it be the duty of government to employ for that end its constitutional power; if the constitutional power of governments extends, as it most unquestionably does, to the making of laws for the burning of heretics; if burning be, as it most assuredly is, in many cases, a most effectual mode of suppressing opinions; why should we not burn?  If the relation in which government ought to stand to the people be, as Mr. Gladstone tells us, a paternal relation, we are irresistibly led to the conclusion that persecution is justifiable.  For the right of propagating opinions by punishment is one which belongs to parents as clearly as the right to give instruction.  A boy is compelled to attend family worship:  he is forbidden to read irreligious books:  if he will not learn his catechism, he is sent to bed without his supper:  if he plays truant at church-time a task is set him.  If he should display the precocity of his talents by expressing impious opinions before his brothers and sisters, we should not much blame his father for cutting short the controversy with a horse-whip.  All the reasons which lead us to think that parents are peculiarly fitted to conduct the education of their children, and that education is the principal end of a parental relation, lead us also to think that parents ought to be allowed to use punishment, if necessary, for the purpose of forcing children, who are incapable of judging for themselves, to receive religious instruction and to attend religious worship.  Why, then, is this prerogative of punishment, so eminently paternal, to be withheld from a paternal government?  It seems to us, also, to be the height of absurdity to employ civil disabilities for the propagation of an opinion, and then to shrink from employing other punishments for the same purpose.  For nothing can be clearer than that, if you punish at all, you ought to punish enough.  The pain caused by punishment is pure unmixed evil, and never ought to be inflicted, except for the sake of some good.  It is mere foolish cruelty to provide penalties which torment the criminal without preventing the crime.  Now it is possible, by sanguinary persecution unrelentingly inflicted, to suppress opinions.  In this way the Albigenses were put down.  In this way the Lollards were put down.  In this way the fair promise of the Reformation was blighted in Italy and Spain.  But we may safely defy Mr. Gladstone to point out a single instance in which the system which he recommends has succeeded.