On certain assumptions, these arguments have great force.  Clearly a man ought not to take pay for doing one thing and do something quite different.  When a body of religionists come together upon certain tenets, it would be a reductio ad absurdum for any of its ministers to be occupied in denying and controverting these tenets.

All this supposes, however, that men will not be made to conform by any means short of prosecution and deprivation; that the suspending of a severe penalty over men’s heads is in itself a harmless device; and that religious systems are now stereotyped to our satisfaction, so that to deviate from them is mere wantonness and love of singularity.  Such are the assumptions that we feel called upon to challenge.

The plea that the Church has engaged itself to the State to teach certain tenets, in return for its emoluments and privileges, has lost its point in our time.  ‘L’etat, c’est moi.’  The Church and the State are composed of the same persons.  Gibbon’s famous mot has collapsed.  ’The religions of the Roman world,’ he says, ’were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful’ The people are now their own magistrates, and the true and the useful must contrive to unite upon the same thing.  If the Church feels subscription and fixity of creed a burden, it has only to turn its members to account in their capacity of citizens of the State to relieve itself.  If it silently ignores the creed, it is still responsible mainly to itself.

[POSSIBLE ABUSES OF CLERICAL FREEDOM.]

The more serious objection is the possible abuse of the freedom of the clergy to utter opinions at variance with the prevailing creed.  This position needs a careful scrutiny.

In the first place, the argument:  supposes a condition of things that has now ceased.  When creeds were accepted in their literality by the bodies professing them, when the state of general opinion contained nothing hostile, and suggested no difficulties,—­for any one member of a body to turn traitor may have well seemed mere perversity, temper, love of singularity, or anything but a wish to get at truth.  The offence assumed the character of a moral obliquity, and discipline can never be relaxed for immorality proper.

All the circumstances are now changed.  The ministers and members of religious communities no longer cherish the same set of doctrines with only immaterial varieties; they no longer accept their articles in the sense of the original framers.  The body at large has contracted the immoral taint; the whole head is sick; any remaining soundness is not with the acquiescent mass, but with the out-spoken individuals.  In such a state of things, ordinary rules are inapplicable.  There is a sort of paralysis of authority, an uncertainty whether to punish or to wink at flagrant heresy.  To say in such a case that the relaxation of the creed is not a thing to be proposed, is to confess, like Livy on the condition of Rome, that we can endure neither our vices nor their remedies.