VI

It will serve us to consider some prejudices, free-thinking and religious.  First the free-thinker.  He has a prejudice very hard to kill.  If I believe in the beginning what Bernard Shaw has found out thus late in the day, that priests are not as bad as they are painted, the free-thinker would deny me intellectual freedom.  The fact of my right to think the matter out and come to that conclusion would count for nothing.  On the other hand, if I were known to have professed a certain faith and to have abandoned it, he would acclaim that as casting off mental slavery.  This is hopelessly confusing.  If a man has ceased to hold a certain belief he deserves no credit for courage in saying so openly.  If he thinks what he once believed, or is supposed to have believed, has no vitality, surely he can have no reason for being afraid of it, and to speak of dangerous consequences from it to him, can be for him at least only a bogey.  His simple denial is, then, no mark of courage.  Courage is a positive thing.  Yet he may well have that courage.  Suppose him in taking his stand to have taken up some social faith that for him has promise of better things.  He will find his new creed surrounded by its own swarm of prejudices, and if he refuse to worship every fetish of the free-thinker, declaring that this stands to him for a certain definite, beautiful thing, and fighting for it, he will find himself denied and scouted by his new friends.  He may find himself often in company with some supposed enemies.  He will surely need in his sincere attitude to life a freedom of mind that is not a name merely but a positive virtue that demands of him more than denunciation of obscurantism, the recognition of a personal duty and the justification of personal works.

VII

The religious prejudice will be no less hard to kill.  Indiscriminate denunciation of unbelievers as wicked men serves no good purpose and leads nowhere.  There are wicked men on all sides.  Our standard must be one that will distinguish the sincere men on all sides; and our loyalty to our particular creeds must be shown in our lives and labours, not in the reviling of the infidel.  We are justified in casting out the hypocrite from every camp, and when we come to this task we can be sure only of the hypocrites in our own; and we should lay it as an injunction on all bodies to purge themselves.  The burden will be laid on all—­not one surely of which men can complain—­that they shall prove their principles in action and lay their prejudices by.  Christians might well find exemplars in the early martyrs, those who for their principles went so readily to the lions.  One may anticipate the complacent rejoinder:  “This is not so exacting an age; men are not asked to die for religion now”—­and one may in turn reply, that, perhaps our age may not be without occasion for such high service, but that