Secondly, I assert that Christianity is charged with many consequences for which it is not responsible.  I believe that religious motives have had no more to do in the formation of nine tenths of the intolerant and persecuting laws which in different countries have been established upon the subject of religion, than they have had to do in England with the making of the game-laws.  These measures, although they have the Christian religion for their subject, are resolvable into a principle which Christianity certainly did not plant (and which Christianity could not universally condemn, because it is not universally wrong), which principle is no other than this, that they who are in possession of power do what they can to keep it.  Christianity is answerable for no part of the mischief which has been brought upon the world by persecution, except that which has arisen from conscientious persecutors.  Now these perhaps have never been either numerous or powerful.  Nor is it to Christianity that even their mistake can fairly be imputed.  They have been misled by an error not properly Christian or religious, but by an error in their moral philosophy.  They pursued the particular, without adverting to the general consequence.  Believing certain articles of faith, or a certain mode of worship, to be highly conducive, or perhaps essential, to salvation, they thought themselves bound to bring all they could, by every means, into them, and this they thought, without considering what would be the effect of such a conclusion when adopted amongst mankind as a general rule of conduct.  Had there been in the New Testament, what there are in the Koran, precepts authorising coercion in the propagation of the religion, and the use of violence towards unbelievers, the case would have been different.  This distinction could not have been taken, nor this defence made.

I apologise for no species nor degree of persecution, but I think that even the fact has been exaggerated.  The slave-trade destroys more in a year than the Inquisition does in a hundred or perhaps hath done since its foundation.

If it be objected, as I apprehend it will be, that Christianity is chargeable with every mischief of which it has been the occasion, though not the motive; I answer that, if the malevolent passions be there, the world will never want occasions.  The noxious element will always find a conductor.  Any point will produce an explosion.  Did the applauded intercommunity of the pagan theology preserve the peace of the Roman world? did it prevent oppressions, proscriptions, massacres, devastation?  Was it bigotry that carried Alexander into the East, or brought Caesar into Gaul?  Are the nations of the world into which Christianity hath not found its way, or from which it hath been banished, free from contentions?  Are their contentions less ruinous and sanguinary?  Is it owing to Christianity, or to the want of it, that the regions of the East, the countries inter quatuor maria, peninsula of Greece,