However, we are warranted to go thus far.  The people often actually do (and perhaps they cannot in general do better) take their religion, not on the coercive, which is impossible, but on the influencing authority of their governors, as wise and informed men.  But if they once take a religion on the word of the state, they cannot in common sense do so a second time, unless they have some concurrent reason for it.  The prejudice in favor of your wisdom is shook by your change.  You confess that you have been wrong, and yet you would pretend to dictate by your sole authority; whereas you disengage the mind by embarrassing it.  For why should I prefer your opinion of to-day to your persuasion of yesterday?  If we must resort to prepossessions for the ground of opinion, it is in the nature of man rather to defer to the wisdom of times past, whose weakness is not before his eyes, than to the present, of whose imbecility he has daily experience.  Veneration of antiquity is congenial to the human, mind.  When, therefore, an establishment would persecute an opinion in possession, it sets against it all the powerful prejudices of human nature.  It even sets its own authority, when it is of most weight, against itself in that very circumstance in which it must necessarily have the least; and it opposes the stable prejudice of time against a new opinion founded on mutability:  a consideration that must render compulsion in such a case the more grievous, as there is no security, that, when the mind is settled in the new opinion, it may not be obliged to give place to one that is still newer, or even, to a return of the old.  But when an ancient establishment begins early to persecute an innovation, it stands upon quite other grounds, and it has all the prejudices and presumptions on its side.  It puts its own authority, not only of compulsion, but prepossession, the veneration of past age, as well as the activity of the present time, against the opinion only of a private man or set of men.  If there be no reason, there is at least some consistency in its proceedings.  Commanding to constancy, it does nothing but that of which it sets an example itself.  But an opinion at once new and persecuting is a monster; because, in the very instant in which it takes a liberty of change, it does not leave to you even a liberty of perseverance.

Is, then, no improvement to be brought into society?  Undoubtedly; but not by compulsion,—­but by encouragement,—­but by countenance, favor, privileges, which are powerful, and are lawful instruments.  The coercive authority of the state is limited to what is necessary for its existence.  To this belongs the whole order of criminal law.  It considers as crimes (that is, the object of punishment) trespasses against those rules for which society was instituted.  The law punishes delinquents, not because they are not good men, but because they are intolerably wicked.  It does bear, and must, with the vices and the follies