Whatever may be urged in defence of such execrable duplicity, there can be no question as to its anti-progressive tendency.  The majority of men are fools, and if such ‘sensible’ politicians as our Doctor and the double doctrinising persecuting ecclesiastics, for whose portraits we are indebted to Mosheim and Beausobre, shall have the teaching of them, fools they are sure to remain.  Men who dare not be ‘mentally faithful’ to themselves may obstruct, but cannot advance the interests of truth.  Colonel Thompson is right.  In legislation, in law, in all the relations of life, we want honesty, not piety.  There is plenty of piety, and to spare, but of honesty—­sterling, bold, uncompromising honesty—­even the best regulated societies can boast a very small stock.  The men best qualified to raise the veil under which truth lies concealed from vulgar gaze, are precisely the men who fear to do it.  Oh, shame upon ye self-styled philosophers, who in your closets laugh at ’our holy religion,’ and in your churches do them reverence.  Were your bosoms warmed by one spark of generous wisdom, silence on the question of religion would be broken, the multitude cease to believe, and imposters to triumph.  But the desire to enlighten others is lost in regard for yourselves, and what Mrs. Grundy may say, is sufficient to frighten ye from the enunciation truth.

Is superstition no evil?  Is there nothing hateful, nothing against which unceasing war should be waged, in the degradation of those unhappy persons who worship idols of their own imagination?  Can error be fraught with good and truth with evil, that we should shrink from doing justice to both?  Everywhere are learnedly ignorant or basely cunning men, who would scare us from dealing with religious error, as all error deserves to be dealt with, by high-sounding jargon about the danger of freeing vulgar minds from the wholesome restraints of certain antiquated beliefs.  Themselves essentially vulgar by habit and in feeling, their estimate of human tendencies is of the meanest, the most grovelling description.  Measuring the chaff of other men by their own bushel, they arrive at the pious but false conclusion that without fear of God there can be no genuine love of man, and that without faith in some one of our five hundred and odd true religions, all the thoughts of our hearts would be evil continually.  They insist upon it that the ’absolute Atheist,’ if virtuous, is so by accident not design; that he can neither love truth, justice, nor his neighbour, except by sheer luck, and that, if bad as his principles, would cut the throat of every man, woman, and child who might have the misfortune to fall in his way.  They argue as if none can think good thoughts or purposely perform good acts unless so far eaten up by superstition as always to keep in view the probable rewards, or equally probable vengeance of some supernatural Being.  Faith in human goodness, irrespective of reward and