Father McShane encouraged his nibble very scientifically.  It would be such a fine thing to bring over one of those Protestant heretics, and a “liberal” one too!—­not that there was any real difference between them, but it sounded better, to say that one of these rationalizing free-and-equal religionists had been made a convert than any of those half-way Protestants who were the slaves of catechisms instead of councils, and of commentators instead of popes.  The subtle priest played his disciple with his finest tackle.  It was hardly necessary:  when anything or anybody wishes to be caught, a bare hook and a coarse line are all that is needed.

If a man has a genuine, sincere, hearty wish to get rid of his liberty, if he is really bent upon becoming a slave, nothing can stop him.  And the temptation is to some natures a very great one.  Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man.  It involves that necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded.  In common life we shirk it by forming habits, which take the place of self-determination.  In politics party-organization saves us the pains of much thinking before deciding how to cast our vote.  In religious matters there are great multitudes watching us perpetually, each propagandist ready with his bundle of finalities, which having accepted we may be at peace.  The more absolute the submission demanded, the stronger the temptation becomes to those who have been long tossed among doubts and conflicts.

So it is that in all the quiet bays which indent the shores of the great ocean of thought, at every sinking wharf, we see moored the hulks and the razees of enslaved or half-enslaved intelligences.  They rock peacefully as children in their cradles on the subdued swell which comes feebly in over the bar at the harbor’s mouth, slowly crusting with barnacles, pulling at their iron cables as if they really wanted to be free; but better contented to remain bound as they are.  For these no more the round unwalled horizon of the open sea, the joyous breeze aloft, the furrow, the foam, the sparkle, that track the rushing keel!  They have escaped the dangers of the wave, and lie still henceforth, evermore.  Happiest of souls, if lethargy is bliss, and palsy the chief beatitude!

America owes its political freedom to religious Protestantism.  But political freedom is reacting on religious prescription with still mightier force.  We wonder, therefore, when we find a soul which was born to a full sense of individual liberty, an unchallenged right of self-determination on every new alleged truth offered to its intelligence, voluntarily surrendering any portion of its liberty to a spiritual dictatorship which always proves to rest, in the last analysis, on a majority vote, nothing more nor less, commonly an old one, passed in those barbarous times when men cursed and murdered each other for differences of opinion, and of course were not in a condition to settle the beliefs of a comparatively civilized community.