Let us add another consideration.  One reason why so many persons are really shocked and pained by the avowal of heretical opinions is the very fact that such avowal is uncommon.  If unbelievers and doubters were more courageous, believers would be less timorous.  It is because they live in an enervating fool’s paradise of seeming assent and conformity, that the breath of an honest and outspoken word strikes so eager and nipping on their sensibilities.  If they were not encouraged to suppose that all the world is of their own mind, if they were forced out of that atmosphere of self-indulgent silences and hypocritical reserves, which is systematically poured round them, they would acquire a robuster mental habit.  They would learn to take dissents for what they are worth.  They would be led either to strengthen or to discard their own opinions, if the dissents happened to be weighty or instructive; either to refute or neglect such dissents as should be ill-founded or insignificant.  They will remain valetudinarians, so long as a curtain of compromise shelters them from the real belief of those of their neighbours who have ventured to use their minds with some measure of independence.  A very brief contact with people who, when the occasion comes, do not shrink from saying what they think, is enough to modify that excessive liability to be shocked at truth-speaking, which is only so common because truth-speaking itself is so unfamiliar.

Now, however great the pain inflicted by the avowal of unbelief, it seems to the present writer that one relationship in life, and one only, justifies us in being silent where otherwise it would be right to speak.  This relationship is that between child and parents.  Those parents are wisest who train their sons and daughters in the utmost liberty both of thought and speech; who do not instill dogmas into them, but inculcate upon them the sovereign importance of correct ways of forming opinions; who, while never dissembling the great fact that if one opinion is true, its contradictory cannot be true also, but must be a lie and must partake of all the evil qualities of a lie, yet always set them the example of listening to unwelcome opinions with patience and candour.  Still all parents are not wise.  They cannot all endure to hear of any religious opinions except their own.  Where it would give them sincere and deep pain to hear a son or daughter avow disbelief in the inspiration of the Bible and so forth, then it seems that the younger person is warranted in refraining from saying that he or she does not accept such and such doctrines.  This, of course, only where the son or daughter feels a tender and genuine attachment to the parent.  Where the parent has not earned this attachment, has been selfish, indifferent, or cruel, the title to the special kind of forbearance of which we are speaking can hardly exist.  In an ordinary way, however, a parent has a claim on us which no other person in the world can have, and a man’s self-respect ought scarcely to be injured if he finds himself shrinking from playing the apostle to his own father and mother.