These conclusions are no doubt very unpalatable; and what makes them peculiarly offensive is, that it is impossible to refute them.  For the deeper we penetrate into this question, the more clearly shall we see the superiority of intellectual acquisitions over moral feeling.  There is no instance on record of an ignorant man who, having good intentions and supreme power to enforce them, has not done far more evil than good.  And whenever the intentions have been very eager, and the power very extensive, the evil has been enormous.  But if you can diminish the sincerity of that man, if you can mix some alloy with his motives, you will likewise diminish the evil which he works.  If he is selfish as well as ignorant, it will often happen [that] you may play off his vice against his ignorance, and by exciting his fears restrain his mischief.  If, however, he has no fear, if he is entirely unselfish, if his sole object is the good of others, if he pursues that object with enthusiasm, upon a large scale, and with disinterested zeal, then it is that you have no check upon him, you have no means of preventing the calamities which in an ignorant age an ignorant man will be sure to inflict.  How entirely this is verified by experience, we may see in studying the history of religious persecution.  To punish even a single man for his religious tenets is assuredly a crime of the deepest dye; but to punish a large body of men, to persecute an entire sect, to attempt to extirpate opinions which, growing out of the state of society in which they arise, are themselves a manifestation of the marvelous and luxuriant fertility of the human mind,—­to do this is not only one of the most pernicious, but one of the most foolish acts that can possibly be conceived.  Nevertheless it is an undoubted fact that an overwhelming majority of religious persecutors have been men of the purest intentions, of the most admirable and unsullied morals.  It is impossible that this should be otherwise.  For they are not bad-intentioned men who seek to enforce opinions which they believe to be good.  Still less are they bad men who are so regardless of temporal considerations as to employ all the resources of their power, not for their own benefit, but for the purpose of propagating a religion which they think necessary to the future happiness of mankind.  Such men as these are not bad, they are only ignorant; ignorant of the nature of truth, ignorant of the consequences of their own acts.  But in a moral point of view their motives are unimpeachable.  Indeed, it is the very ardor of their sincerity which warms them into persecution.  It is the holy zeal by which they are fired that quickens their fanaticism into a deadly activity.  If you can impress any man with an absorbing conviction of the supreme importance of some moral or religious doctrine; if you can make him believe that those who reject that doctrine are doomed to eternal perdition; if you then give that man power, and by means of his ignorance blind him