The main field of discussion touching Compromise in expression and avowal lies in the region of religious belief. In politics no one seriously contends that respect for the feelings and prejudices of other people requires us to be silent about our opinions. A republican, for instance, is at perfect liberty to declare himself so. Nobody will say that he is not within his rights if he should think it worth while to practise this liberty, though of course he will have to face the obloquy which attends all opinion that is not shared by the more demonstrative and vocal portions of the public. It is true that in every stable society a general conviction prevails of the extreme undesirableness of constantly laying bare the foundations of government. Incessant discussion of the theoretical bases of the social union is naturally considered worse than idle. It is felt by many wise men that the chief business of the political thinker is to interest himself in generalisations of such a sort as leads with tolerable straightness to practical improvements of a far-reaching and durable kind. Even among those, however, who thus feel it not to be worth while to be for ever handling the abstract principles which are, after all, only clumsy expressions of the real conditions that bring and keep men together in society, yet nobody of any consideration pretends to silence or limit the free discussion of these principles. Although a man is not likely to be thanked who calls attention to the vast discrepancies between the theory and practice of the constitution, yet nobody now would countenance the notion of an inner doctrine in politics. We smile at the line that Hume took in speaking of the doctrine of non-resistance. He did not deny that the right of resistance to a tyrannical sovereign does actually belong to a nation. But, he said, 'if ever on any occasion it were laudable to conceal truth from the populace, it must be confessed that the doctrine of resistance affords such an example; and that all speculative reasoners ought to observe with regard to this principle the same cautious silence which the laws, in every species of government, have ever prescribed to themselves.' As if the cautious silence of the political writer could prevent a populace from feeling the heaviness of an oppressor's hand, and striving to find relief from unjust burdens. As if any nation endowed with enough of the spirit of independence to assent to the right of resistance when offered to them as a speculative theorem, would not infallibly be led by the same spirit to assert the right without the speculative theorem. That so acute a head as Hume's should have failed to perceive these very plain considerations, and that he should moreover have perpetrated the absurdity of declaring the right of resistance, in the same breath in which he declares the laudableness of keeping it a secret, only allows how carefully a man need steer after he has once involved himself in the labyrinths of Economy.^[18]

In religion the unreasonableness of imposing a similar cautious silence is not yet fully established, nor the vicious effects of practising it clearly recognised. In these high matters an amount of economy and management is held praiseworthy, which in any other subject would be universally condemned as cowardly and ignoble. Indeed the preliminary stage has scarcely been reached—the stage in which public opinion grants to every one the unrestricted right of shaping his own beliefs, independently of those of the people who surround him. Any woman, for instance, suspected of having cast behind her the Bible and all practices of devotion and the elementary articles of the common creed, would be distrustfully regarded even by those who wink at the same kind of mental boldness in men. Nay, she would be so regarded even by some of the very men who have themselves discarded as superstition what they still wish women to retain for law and gospel. So long as any class of adults are effectually discouraged in the free use of their minds upon the most important subjects, we are warranted in saying that the era of free thought, which naturally precedes the era of free speech, is still imperfectly developed.

The duties and rights of free speech are by no means identical with those of independent thought. One general reason for this is tolerably plain. The expression of opinion directly affects other people, while its mere formation directly affects no one but ourselves. Therefore the limits of compromise in expression are less widely and freely placed, because the rights and interests of all who may be made listeners to our spoken or written words are immediately concerned. In forming opinions, a man or woman owes no consideration to any person or persons whatever. Truth is the single object. It is truth that in the forum of conscience claims an undivided allegiance. The publication of opinion stands on another footing. That is an external act, with possible consequences, like all other external acts, both to the doer and to every one within the sphere of his influence. And, besides these, it has possible consequences to the prosperity of the opinion itself.^[19]

A hundred questions of fitness, of seasonableness, of conflicting expediencies, present themselves in this connection, and nothing gives more anxiety to a sensible man who holds notions opposed to the current prejudices, than to hit the right mark where intellectual integrity and prudence, firmness and wise reserve, are in exact accord. When we come to declaring opinions that are, however foolishly and unreasonably, associated with pain and even a kind of turpitude in the minds of those who strongly object to them, then some of our most powerful sympathies are naturally engaged. We wonder whether duty to truth can possibly require us to inflict keen distress on those to whom we are bound by the tenderest and most consecrated ties. This is so wholly honourable a sentiment, that no one who has not made himself drunk with the thin sour wine of a crude and absolute logic will refuse to consider it. Before, however, attempting to illustrate cases of conscience in this order, we venture to make a short digression into the region of the matter, as distinct from the manner of free speech. One or two changes of great importance in the way in which men think about religion, bear directly upon the conditions on which they may permit themselves and others to speak about it.

The peculiar character of all the best kinds of dissent from the nominal creed of the time, makes it rather less difficult for us to try to reconcile unflinching honesty with a just and becoming regard for the feelings of those who have claims upon our forbearance, than would have been the case a hundred years ago. 'It is not now with a polite sneer,' as a high ecclesiastical authority lately admitted, 'still less with a rude buffet or coarse words, that Christianity is assailed.' Before churchmen congratulate themselves too warmly on this improvement in the nature of the attack, perhaps they ought to ask themselves how far it is due to the change in the position of the defending party. The truth is that the coarse and realistic criticism of which Voltaire was the consummate master, has done its work. It has driven the defenders of the old faith into the milder and more genial climate of non-natural interpretations, and the historic sense, and a certain elastic relativity of dogma. The old criticism was victorious, but after victory it vanished. One reason of this was that the coarse and realistic forms of belief had either vanished before it, or else they forsook their ancient pretensions and clothed themselves in more modest robes. The consequence of this, and of other causes which might be named, is that the modern attack, while fully as serious and much more radical, has a certain gravity, decorum, and worthiness of form. No one of any sense or knowledge now thinks the Christian religion had its origin in deliberate imposture. The modern freethinker does not attack it; he explains it. And what is more, he explains it by referring its growth to the better, and not to the worse part of human nature. He traces it to men's cravings for a higher morality. He finds its source in their aspirations after nobler expression of that feeling for the incommensurable things, which is in truth under so many varieties of inwoven pattern the common universal web of religious faith.

The result of this way of looking at a creed which a man no longer accepts, is that he is able to speak of it with patience and historic respect. He can openly mark his dissent from it, without exacerbating the orthodox sentiment by galling pleasantries or bitter animadversion upon details. We are now awake to the all-important truth that belief in this or that detail of superstition is the result of an irrational state of mind, and flows logically from superstitious premisses. We see that it is to begin at the wrong end, to assail the deductions as impossible, instead of sedulously building up a state of mind in which their impossibility would become spontaneously visible.

Besides the great change which such a point of view makes in men's way of speaking of a religion, whose dogmas and documents they reject, there is this further consideration leaning in the same direction. The tendency of modern free thought is more and more visibly towards the extraction of the first and more permanent elements of the old faith, to make the purified material of the new. When Dr. Congreve met the famous epigram about Comte's system being Catholicism minus Christianity, by the reply that it is Catholicism plus Science, he gave an ingenious expression to the direction which is almost necessarily taken by all who attempt, in however informal a manner, to construct for themselves some working system of faith, in place of the faith which science and criticism have sapped. In what ultimate form, acceptable to great multitudes of men, these attempts will at last issue, no one can now tell. For we, like the Hebrews of old, shall all have to live and die in faith, 'not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and being persuaded of them, and embracing them, and confessing that we are strangers and pilgrims on the earth.' Meanwhile, after the first great glow and passion of the just and necessary revolt of reason against superstition have slowly lost the exciting splendour of the dawn, and become diffused in the colourless space of a rather bleak noonday, the mind gradually collects again some of the ideas of the old religion of the West, and willingly, or even joyfully, suffers itself to be once more breathed upon by something of its spirit. Christianity was the last great religious synthesis. It is the one nearest to us. Nothing is more natural than that those who cannot rest content with intellectual analysis, while awaiting the advent of the Saint Paul of the humanitarian faith of the future, should gather up provisionally such fragmentary illustrations of this new faith as are to be found in the records of the old. Whatever form may be ultimately imposed on our vague religious aspirations by some prophet to come, who shall unite sublime depth of feeling and lofty purity of life with strong intellectual grasp and the gift of a noble eloquence, we may at least be sure of this, that it will stand as closely related to Christianity as Christianity stood closely related to the old Judaic dispensation. It is commonly assumed that the rejecters of the popular religion stand in face of it, as the Christians stood in face of the pagan belief and pagan rites in the Empire. The analogy is inexact. The modern denier, if he is anything better than that, or entertains hopes of a creed to come, is nearer to the position of the Christianising Jew.^[20] Science, when she has accomplished all her triumphs in her own order, will still have to go back, when the time comes, to assist in the building up of a new creed by which men can live. The builders will have to seek material in the purified and sublimated ideas, of which the confessions and rites of the Christian churches have been the grosser expression. Just as what was once the new dispensation was preached a Judaeos ad Judaeos apud Judaeos, so must the new, that is to be, find a Christian teacher and Christian hearers. It can hardly be other than an expansion, a development, a readaptation, of all the moral and spiritual truth that lay hidden under the worn-out forms. It must be such a harmonising of the truth with our intellectual conceptions as shall fit it to be an active guide to conduct. In a world 'where men sit and hear each other groan, where but to think is to be full of sorrow,' it is hard to imagine a time when we shall be indifferent to that sovereign legend of Pity. We have to incorporate it in some wider gospel of Justice and Progress.

I shall not, I hope, be suspected of any desire to prophesy too smooth things. It is no object of ours to bridge over the gulf between belief in the vulgar theology and disbelief. Nor for a single moment do we pretend that, when all the points of contact between virtuous belief and virtuous disbelief are made the most of that good faith will allow, there will not still and after all remain a terrible controversy between those who cling passionately to all the consolations, mysteries, personalities, of the orthodox faith, and us who have made up our minds to face the worst, and to shape, as best we can, a life in which the cardinal verities of the common creed shall have no place. The future faith, like the faith of the past, brings not peace but a sword. It is a tale not of concord, but of households divided against themselves. Those who are incessantly striving to make the old bottles hold the new wine, to reconcile the irreconcilable, to bring the Bible and the dogmas of the churches to be good friends with history and criticism, are prompted by the humanest intention.^[21] One sympathises with this amiable anxiety to soften shocks, and break the rudeness of a vital transition. In this essay, at any rate, there is no such attempt. We know that it is the son against the father, and the mother-in-law against the daughter-in-law. No softness of speech will disguise the portentous differences between those who admit a supernatural revelation and those who deny it. No charity nor goodwill can narrow the intellectual breach between those who declare that a world without an ever-present Creator with intelligible attributes would be to them empty and void, and those who insist that none of the attributes of a Creator can ever be grasped by the finite intelligence of men.^[22] Our object in urging the historic, semi-conservative, and almost sympathetic quality, which distinguishes the unbelief of to-day from the unbelief of a hundred years ago, is only to show that the most strenuous and upright of plain-speakers is less likely to shock and wound the lawful sensibilities of devout persons than he would have been so long as unbelief went no further than bitter attack on small details. In short, all save the purely negative and purely destructive school of freethinkers, are now able to deal with the beliefs from which they dissent, in a way which makes patient and disinterested controversy not wholly impossible.

One more point of much importance ought to be mentioned. The belief that heresy is the result of wilful depravity is fast dying out. People no longer seriously think that speculative error is bound up with moral iniquity, or that mistaken thinking is either the result or the cause of wicked living. Even the official mouthpieces of established beliefs now usually represent a bad heart as only one among other possible causes of unbelief. It divides the curse with ignorance, intellectual shallowness, the unfortunate influence of plausible heresiarchs, and other alternative roots of evil. They thus leave a way of escape, by which the person who does not share their own convictions may still be credited with a good moral character. Some persons, it is true, 'cannot see how a man who deliberately rejects the Roman Catholic religion can, in the eyes of those who earnestly believe it, be other than a rebel against God.' They assure us that, 'as opinions become better marked and more distinctly connected with action, the truth that decided dissent from them implies more or less of a reproach upon those who hold them decidedly, becomes so obvious that every one perceives it.' No doubt a protestant or a sceptic regards the beliefs of a catholic as a reproach upon the believer's understanding. So the man whose whole faith rests on the miraculous and on acts of special intervention, regards the strictly positive and scientific thinker as the dupe of a crude and narrow logic. But this now carries with it no implication of moral obliquity. De Maistre's rather grotesque conviction that infidels always die of horrible diseases with special names, could now only be held among the very dregs of the ecclesiastical world.

Nor is it correct to say that 'when religious differences come to be, and are regarded as, mere differences of opinion, it is because the controversy is really decided in the sceptical sense.' Those who agree with the present writer, for example, are not sceptics. They positively, absolutely, and without reserve, reject as false the whole system of objective propositions which make up the popular belief of the day, in one and all of its theological expressions. They look upon that system as mischievous in its consequences to society, for many reasons,—among others because it tends to divert and misdirect the most energetic faculties of human nature. This, however, does not make them suspect the motives or the habitual morality of those who remain in the creed in which they were nurtured. The difference is a difference of opinion, as purely as if we refused to accept the undulatory theory of light; and we treat it as such. Then reverse this. Why is it any more impossible for those who remain in the theological stage, who are not in the smallest degree sceptical, who in their heart of hearts embrace without a shadow of misgiving all the mysteries of the faith, why is it any more impossible for them than for us, whose convictions are as strong as theirs, to treat the most radical dissidence as that and nothing other or worse? Logically, it perhaps might not be hard to convict them of inconsistency, but then, as has been so often said, inconsistency is a totally different thing from insincerity, or doubting adherence, or silent scepticism. The beliefs of an ordinary man are a complex structure of very subtle materials, all compacted into a whole, not by logic, but by lack of logic; not by syllogism or sorites, but by the vague.

As a plain matter of fact and observation, we may all perceive that dissent from religious opinion less and less implies reproach in any serious sense. We all of us know in the flesh liberal catholics and latitudinarian protestants, who hold the very considerable number of beliefs that remain to them, quite as firmly and undoubtingly as believers who are neither liberal nor latitudinarian. The compatibility of error in faith with virtue in conduct is to them only a mystery the more, a branch of the insoluble problem of Evil, permitted by a Being at once all-powerful and all-benevolent. Stringent logic may make short work of either fact,—a benevolent author of evil, or a virtuous despiser of divine truth. But in an atmosphere of mystery, logical contradictions melt away. Faith gives a sanction to that tolerant and charitable judgment of the character of heretics, which has its real springs partly in common human sympathy whereby we are all bound to one another, and partly in experience, which teaches us that practical righteousness and speculative orthodoxy do not always have their roots in the same soil. The world is every day growing larger. The range of the facts of the human race is being enormously extended by naturalists, by historians, by philologists, by travellers, by critics. The manifold past experiences of humanity are daily opening out to us in vaster and at the same time more ordered proportions. And so even those who hold fast to Christianity as the noblest, strongest, and only final conclusion of these experiences, are yet constrained to admit that it is no more than a single term in a very long and intricate series.

The object of the foregoing digression is to show some cause for thinking that dissent from the current beliefs is less and less likely to inflict upon those who retain them any very intolerable kind or degree of mental pain. Therefore it is in so far all the plainer, as well as easier, a duty not to conceal such dissent. What we have been saying comes to this. If a believer finds that his son, for instance, has ceased to believe, he no longer has this disbelief thrust upon him in gross and irreverent forms. Nor does he any longer suppose that the unbelieving son must necessarily be a profligate. And moreover, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, he no longer supposes that infidels, of his own family or acquaintance at any rate, will consume for eternal ages in lakes of burning marl.

Let us add another consideration. One reason why so many persons are really shocked and pained by the avowal of heretical opinions is the very fact that such avowal is uncommon. If unbelievers and doubters were more courageous, believers would be less timorous. It is because they live in an enervating fool's paradise of seeming assent and conformity, that the breath of an honest and outspoken word strikes so eager and nipping on their sensibilities. If they were not encouraged to suppose that all the world is of their own mind, if they were forced out of that atmosphere of self-indulgent silences and hypocritical reserves, which is systematically poured round them, they would acquire a robuster mental habit. They would learn to take dissents for what they are worth. They would be led either to strengthen or to discard their own opinions, if the dissents happened to be weighty or instructive; either to refute or neglect such dissents as should be ill-founded or insignificant. They will remain valetudinarians, so long as a curtain of compromise shelters them from the real belief of those of their neighbours who have ventured to use their minds with some measure of independence. A very brief contact with people who, when the occasion comes, do not shrink from saying what they think, is enough to modify that excessive liability to be shocked at truth-speaking, which is only so common because truth-speaking itself is so unfamiliar.

Now, however great the pain inflicted by the avowal of unbelief, it seems to the present writer that one relationship in life, and one only, justifies us in being silent where otherwise it would be right to speak. This relationship is that between child and parents. Those parents are wisest who train their sons and daughters in the utmost liberty both of thought and speech; who do not instill dogmas into them, but inculcate upon them the sovereign importance of correct ways of forming opinions; who, while never dissembling the great fact that if one opinion is true, its contradictory cannot be true also, but must be a lie and must partake of all the evil qualities of a lie, yet always set them the example of listening to unwelcome opinions with patience and candour. Still all parents are not wise. They cannot all endure to hear of any religious opinions except their own. Where it would give them sincere and deep pain to hear a son or daughter avow disbelief in the inspiration of the Bible and so forth, then it seems that the younger person is warranted in refraining from saying that he or she does not accept such and such doctrines. This, of course, only where the son or daughter feels a tender and genuine attachment to the parent. Where the parent has not earned this attachment, has been selfish, indifferent, or cruel, the title to the special kind of forbearance of which we are speaking can hardly exist. In an ordinary way, however, a parent has a claim on us which no other person in the world can have, and a man's self-respect ought scarcely to be injured if he finds himself shrinking from playing the apostle to his own father and mother.

One can indeed imagine circumstances where this would not be true. If you are persuaded that you have had revealed to you a glorious gospel of light and blessedness, it is impossible not to thirst to impart such tidings most eagerly to those who are closest about your heart. We are not in that position. We have as yet no magnificent vision, so definite, so touching, so 'clothed with the beauty of a thousand stars,' as to make us eager, for the sake of it, to murder all the sweetnesses of filial piety in an aggressive eristic. This much one concedes. Yet let us ever remember that those elders are of nobler type who have kept their minds in a generous freedom, and have made themselves strong with that magnanimous confidence in truth, which the Hebrew expressed in old phrase, that if counsel or work be of men it will come to nought, but if it be of God ye cannot overthrow it.

Even in the case of parents, and even though our new creed is but rudimentary, there can be no good reason why we should go further in the way of economy than mere silence. Neither they nor any other human being can possibly have a right to expect us, not merely to abstain from the open expression of dissents, but positively to profess unreal and feigned assents. No fear of giving pain, no wish to soothe the alarms of those to whom we owe much, no respect for the natural clinging of the old to the faith which has accompanied them through honourable lives, can warrant us in saying that we believe to be true what we are convinced is false. The most lax moralist counts a lie wrong, even when the motive is unselfish, and springs from the desire to give pleasure to those whom it is our duty to please. A deliberate lie avowedly does not cease to be one because it concerns spiritual things. Nor is it the less wrong because it is uttered by one to whom all spiritual things have become indifferent. Filial affection is a motive which would, if any motive could, remove some of the taint of meanness with which pious lying, like every other kind of lying, tends to infect character. The motive may no doubt ennoble the act, though the act remains in the category of forbidden things. But the motive of these complaisant assents and false affirmations, taken at their very best, is still comparatively a poor motive. No real elevation of spirit is possible for a man who is willing to subordinate his convictions to his domestic affections, and to bring himself to a habit of viewing falsehood lightly, lest the truth should shock the illegitimate and over-exacting sensibilities either of his parents or any one else. We may understand what is meant by the logic of the feelings, and accept it as the proper corrective for a too intense egoism. But when the logic of the feelings is invoked to substitute the egoism of the family for the slightly narrower egoism of the individual, it can hardly be more than a fine name for self-indulgence and a callous indifference to all the largest human interests.

This brings us to consider the case of another no less momentous relationship, and the kind of compromise in the matter of religious conformity which it justifies or imposes. It constantly happens that the husband has wholly ceased to believe the religion to which his wife clings with unshaken faith. We need not enter into the causes why women remain in bondage to opinions which so many cultivated men either reject or else hold in a transcendental and non-natural sense. The only question with which we are concerned is the amount of free assertion of his own convictions which a man should claim and practise, when he knows that such convictions are distasteful to his wife. Is it lawful, as it seems to be in dealing with parents, to hold his conviction silently? Is it lawful either positively or by implication to lead his wife to suppose that he shares her opinions, when in truth he rejects them?

If it were not for the maxims and practice in daily use among men otherwise honourable, one would not suppose it possible that two answers could be given to these questions by any one with the smallest pretence of principle or self-respect. As it is, we all of us know men who deliberately reject the entire Christian system, and still think it compatible with uprightness to summon their whole establishments round them at morning and evening, and on their knees to offer up elaborately formulated prayers, which have just as much meaning to them as the entrails of the sacrificial victim had to an infidel haruspex. We see the same men diligently attending religious services; uttering assents to confessions of which they really reject every syllable; kneeling, rising, bowing, with deceptive solemnity; even partaking of the sacrament with a consummate devoutness that is very edifying to all who are not in the secret, and who do not know that they are acting a part, and making a mock both of their own reason and their own probity, merely to please persons whose delusions they pity and despise from the bottom of their hearts.

On the surface there is certainly nothing to distinguish this kind of conduct from the grossest hypocrisy. Is there anything under the surface to relieve it from this complexion? Is there any weight in the sort of answer which such men make to the accusation that their conformity is a very degrading form of deceit, and a singularly mischievous kind of treachery? Is the plea of a wish to spare mental discomfort to others an admissible and valid plea? It seems to us to be none of these things, and for the following among other reasons.

If a man drew his wife by lot, or by any other method over which neither he nor she has any control, as in the case of parents, perhaps he might with some plausibleness contend that he owed her certain limited deferences and reserves, just as we admit that he may owe them to his parents. But this is not the case. Marriage, in this country at least, is the result of mutual choice. If men and women do as a matter of fact usually make this choice hastily and on wofully imperfect information of one another's characters, that is no warrant for a resort to unlawful expedients to remedy the blunder. If a woman cares ardently enough about religion to feel keen distress at the idea of dissent from it on the part of those closely connected with her, she surely may be expected to take reasonable pains to ascertain beforehand the religious attitude of one with whom she is about to unite herself for life. On the other hand, if a man sets any value on his own opinions, if they are in any real sense a part of himself, he must be guilty of something like deliberate and systematic duplicity during the acquaintance preceding marriage, if his dissent has remained unsuspected. Certainly if men go through society before marriage under false colours, and feign beliefs which they do not hold, they have only themselves to thank for the degradation of having to keep up the imposture afterwards. Suppose a protestant were to pass himself off for a catholic because he happened to meet a catholic lady whom he desired to marry. Everybody would agree in calling such a man by a very harsh name. It is hard to see why a freethinker, who by reticence and conformity passes himself off for a believer, should be more leniently judged. The differences between a catholic and a protestant are assuredly not any greater than those between a believer and an unbeliever. We all admit the baseness of dissimulation in the former case. Why is it any less base in the latter?

Marriages, however, are often made in haste, or heedlessly, or early in life, before either man or woman has come to feel very deeply about religion either one way or another. The woman does not know how much she will need religion, nor what comfort it may bring to her. The man does not know all the objections to it which may disclose themselves to his understanding as the years ripen. There is always at work that most unfortunate maxim, tacitly held and acted upon in ninety-nine marriages out of a hundred, that money is of importance, and social position is of importance, and good connections are of importance, and health and manners and comely looks, and that the only thing which is of no importance whatever is opinion and intellectual quality and temper. Now granting that both man and woman are indifferent at the time of their union, is that any reason why upon either of them acquiring serious convictions, the other should be expected, out of mere complaisance, to make a false and hypocritical pretence of sharing them? To see how flimsy is this plea of fearing to give pain to the religious sensitiveness of women, we have only to imagine one or two cases which go beyond the common experience, yet which ought not to strain the plea, if it be valid.

Thus, if my wife turns catholic, am I to pretend to turn catholic too, to save her the horrible distress of thinking that I am doomed to eternal perdition? Or if she chooses to embrace the doctrine of direct illumination from heaven, and to hear voices bidding her to go or come, to do or abstain from doing, am I too to shape my conduct after these fancied monitions? Or if it comes into her mind to serve tables, and to listen in all faith to the miracles of spiritualism, am I, lest I should pain her, to feign a surrender of all my notions of evidence, to pretend a transformation of all my ideas of worthiness in life and beyond life, and to go to sÉances with the same regularity and seriousness with which you go to church? Of course in each of these cases everybody who does not happen to share the given peculiarity of belief, will agree that however severely a husband's dissent might pain the wife, whatever distress and discomfort it might inflict upon her, yet he would be bound to let her suffer, rather than sacrifice his veracity and self-respect. Why then is it any less discreditable to practise an insincere conformity in more ordinary circumstances? If the principle of such conformity is good for anything at all, it ought to cover these less usual cases as completely as the others which are more usual. Indeed there would be more to be said on behalf of conformity for politeness' sake, where the woman had gone through some great process of change, for then one might suppose that her heart was deeply set on the matter. Even then the plea would be worthless, but it is more indisputably worthless still where the sentiment which we are bidden to respect at the cost of our own freedom of speech is nothing more laudable than a fear of moving out of the common groove of religious opinion, or an intolerant and unreasoned bigotry, or mere stupidity and silliness of the vulgarest type.^[23]

Ah, it is said, you forget that women cannot live without religion. The present writer is equally of this opinion that women cannot be happy without a religion, nor men either. That is not the question. It does not follow because a woman cannot be happy without a religion, that therefore she cannot be happy unless her husband is of the same religion. Still less, that she would be made happy by his insincerely pretending to be of the same religion. And least of all is it true, if both these propositions were credible, that even then for the sake of her happiness he is bound not merely to live a life of imposture, but in so doing to augment the general forces of imposture in the world, and to make the chances of truth, light, and human improvement more and more unfavourable. Women are at present far less likely than men to possess a sound intelligence and a habit of correct judgment. They will remain so, while they have less ready access than men to the best kinds of literary and scientific training, and—what is far more important—while social arrangements exclude them from all those kinds of public activity, which are such powerful agents both in fitting men to judge soundly, and in forming in them the sense of responsibility for their judgments being sound.

It may be contended that this alleged stronger religiosity of women, however coarse and poor in its formulae, is yet of constant value as a protest in favour of the maintenance of the religious element in human character and life, and that this is a far more important thing for us all than the greater or less truth of the dogmas with which such religiosity happens to be associated. In reply to this, without tediously labouring the argument, I venture to make the following observations. In the first place, it is an untenable idea that religiosity or devoutness of spirit is valuable in itself, without reference to the goodness or badness of the dogmatic forms and the practices in which it clothes itself. A fakir would hardly be an estimable figure in our society, merely because his way of living happens to be a manifestation of the religious spirit. If the religious spirit leads to a worthy and beautiful life, if it shows itself in cheerfulness, in pity, in charity and tolerance, in forgiveness, in a sense of the largeness and the mystery of things, in a lifting up of the soul in gratitude and awe to some supreme power and sovereign force, then whatever drawback there may be in the way of superstitious dogma, still such a spirit is on the whole a good thing. If not, not. It would be better without the superstition: even with the superstition it is good. But if the religious spirit is only a fine name for narrowness of understanding, for stubborn intolerance, for mere social formality, for a dread of losing that poor respectability which means thinking and doing exactly as the people around us think and do, then the religious spirit is not a good thing, but a thoroughly bad and hateful thing. To that we owe no management of any kind. Any one who suppresses his real opinions, and feigns others, out of deference to such a spirit as this in his household, ought to say plainly both to himself and to us that he cares more for his own ease and undisturbed comfort than he cares for truth and uprightness. For it is that, and not any tenderness for holy things, which is the real ground of his hypocrisy.

Now with reference to the religious spirit in its nobler form, it is difficult to believe that any one genuinely animated by it would be soothed by the knowledge that her dearest companion is going through life with a mask on, quietly playing a part, uttering untrue professions, doing his best to cheat her and the rest of the world by a monstrous spiritual make-believe. One would suppose that instead of having her religious feeling gratified by conformity on these terms, nothing could wound it so bitterly nor outrage it so unpardonably. To know that her sensibility is destroying the entireness of the man's nature, its loyalty alike to herself and to truth, its freedom and singleness and courage—surely this can hardly be less distressing to a fine spirit than the suspicion that his heresies may bring him to the pit, or than the void of going through life without even the semblance of religious sympathy between them. If it be urged that the woman would never discover the piety of the man to be a counterfeit, we reply that unless her own piety were of the merely formal kind, she would be sure to make the discovery. The congregation in the old story were untouched by the disguised devil's eloquence on behalf of religion: it lacked unction. The verbal conformity of the unbeliever lacks unction, and its hollowness is speedily revealed to the quick apprehension of true faith.^[24]

Let us not be supposed to be arguing in favour of incessant battle of high dialectic in the household. Nothing could be more destructive of the gracious composure and mental harmony, of which household life ought to be, but perhaps seldom is, the great organ and instrument. Still less are we pleading for the freethinker's right at every hour of day or night to mock, sneer, and gibe at the sincere beliefs and conscientiously performed rites of those, whether men or women, whether strangers or kinsfolk, from whose religion he disagrees. 'It is not ancient impressions only,' said Pascal, 'which are capable of abusing us. The charm of novelty has the same power.' The prate of new-born scepticism may be as tiresome and as odious as the cant of gray orthodoxy. Religious discussion is not to be foisted upon us at every turn either by defenders or assailants. All we plead for is that when the opportunity meets the freethinker full in front, he is called upon to speak as freely as he thinks. Not more than this. A plain man has no trouble in acquiring this tact of reasonableness. We may all write what we please, because it is in the discretion of the rest of the world whether they will hearken or not. But in the family this is not so. If a man systematically intrudes disrespectful and unwelcome criticism upon a woman who retains the ancient belief, he is only showing that freethinker may be no more than bigot differently writ. It ought to be essential to no one's self-respect that he cannot consent to live with people who do not think as he thinks. We may be sure that there is something shallow and convulsive about the beliefs of a man who cannot allow his house-mates to possess their own beliefs in peace.

On the other hand, it is essential to the self-respect of every one with the least love of truth that he should be free to express his opinions on every occasion, where silence would be taken for an assent which he does not really give. Still more unquestionably, he should be free from any obligation to forswear himself either directly, as by false professions, or by implication, as when he attend services, public or private, which are to him the symbol of superstition and mere spiritual phantasmagoria. The vindication of this simple right of living one's life honestly can hardly demand any heroic virtue. A little of the straightforwardness which men are accustomed to call manly, is the only quality that is needed; a little of that frank courage and determination in spiritual things, which men are usually so ready to practise towards their wives in temporal things. It must be a keen delight to a cynic to see a man who owns that he cannot bear to pain his wife by not going to church and saying prayers, yet insisting on having his own way, fearlessly thwarting her wishes, and contradicting her opinions, in every other detail, small and great, of the domestic economy.

The truth of the matter is that the painful element in companionship is not difference of opinion, but discord of temperament. The important thing is not that two people should be inspired by the same convictions, but rather that each of them should hold his and her own convictions in a high and worthy spirit. Harmony of aim, not identity of conclusion, is the secret of the sympathetic life; to stand on the same moral plane, and that, if possible, a high one; to find satisfaction in different explanations of the purpose and significance of life and the universe, and yet the same satisfaction. It is certainly not less possible to disbelieve religiously than to believe religiously. This accord of mind, this emulation in freedom and loftiness of soul, this kindred sense of the awful depth of the enigma which the one believes to be answered, and the other suspects to be for ever unanswerable—here, and not in a degrading and hypocritical conformity, is the true gratification of those spiritual sensibilities which are alleged to be so much higher in women than in men. Where such an accord exists, there may still be solicitude left in the mind of either at the superstition or the incredulity of the other, but it will be solicitude of that magnanimous sort which is in some shape or other the inevitable and not unfruitful portion of every better nature.

If there are women who petulantly or sourly insist on more than this kind of harmony, it is probable that their system of divinity is little better than a special manifestation of shrewishness. The man is as much bound to resist that, as he is bound to resist extravagance in spending money, or any other vice of character. If he does not resist it, if he suppresses his opinions, and practices a hypocritical conformity, it must be from weakness of will and principle. Against this we have nothing to say. A considerable proportion of people, men no less than women, are born invertebrate, and they must got on as they best can. But let us at least bargain that they shall not erect the maxims of their own feebleness into a rule for those who are braver and of stronger principle than themselves. And do not let the accidental exigencies of a personal mistake be made the foundation of a general doctrine. It is a poor saying, that the world is to become void of spiritual sincerity, because Xanthippe has a turn for respectable theology.

One or two words should perhaps be said in this place as to conformity to common religious belief in the education of children. Where the parents differ, the one being an unbeliever, the other a believer, it is almost impossible for anybody to lay down a general rule. The present writer certainly has no ambition to attempt the thorny task of compiling a manual for mixed marriages. It is perhaps enough to say that all would depend upon the nature of the beliefs which the religious person wished to inculcate. Considering that the woman has an absolutely equal moral right with the man to decide in what faith the child shall be brought up, and considering how important it is that the mother should take an active part in the development of the child's affections and impulses, the most resolute of deniers may perhaps think that the advantages of leaving the matter to her, outweigh the disadvantages of having a superstitious bias given to the young mind. In these complex cases an honest and fair-minded man's own instincts are more likely to lead him right than any hard and fast rule. Two reserves in assenting to the wife's control of early teaching will probably suggest themselves to everybody who is in earnest about religion. First, if the theology which the woman desires to instill contains any of those wicked and depraving doctrines which neither Catholicism nor Calvinism is without, in the hands of some professors, the husband is as much justified in pressing his legal rights over the child to the uttermost, as he would be if the proposed religion demanded physical mutilation. Secondly, he will not himself take part in baptismal or other ceremonies which are to him no better than mere mummeries, nor will he ever do anything to lead his children at any age to suppose that he believes what he does not believe. Such limitations as these are commanded by all considerations alike of morality and good sense.

To turn to the more normal case where either the man has had the wise forethought not to yoke himself unequally with a person of ardent belief which he does not share, or where both parents dissent from the popular creed. Here, whatever difficulties may attend its application, the principle is surely as clear as the sun at noonday. There can be no good plea for the deliberate and formal inculcation upon the young of a number of propositions which you believe to be false. To do this is to sow tares not in your enemy's field, but in the very ground which is most precious of all others to you and most full of hope for the future. To allow it to be done merely that children may grow up in the stereotyped mould, is simply to perpetuate in new generations the present thick-sighted and dead-heavy state of our spirits. It is to do one's best to keep society for an indefinite time sapped by hollow and void professions, instead of being nourished by sincerity and whole-heartedness.^[25]

Nor here, more than elsewhere in this chapter, are we trying to turn the family into a field of ceaseless polemic. No one who knows the stuff of which life is made, the pressure of material cares, the play of passion, the busy energising of the affections, the anxieties of health, and all the other solicitudes, generous or ignoble, which naturally absorb the days of the common multitude of men—is likely to think such an ideal either desirable or attainable. Least of all is it desirable to give character a strong set in this polemical direction in its most plastic days. The controversial and denying humour is a different thing from the habit of being careful to know what we mean by the words we use, and what evidence there is for the beliefs we hold. It is possible to foster the latter habit without creating the former. And it is possible to bring up the young in dissent from the common beliefs around them, or in indifference to them, without engendering any of that pride in eccentricity for its own sake, which is so little likeable a quality in either young or old. There is, however, little risk of an excess in this direction. The young tremble even more than the old at the penalties of nonconformity. There is more excuse for them in this. Such penalties in their case usually come closer and in more stringent forms. Neither have they had time to find out, as their elders have or ought to have found out, what a very moderate degree of fortitude enables us to bear up against social disapproval, when we know that it is nothing more than the common form of convention.

The great object is to keep the minds of the young as open as possible in the matter of religion; to breed in them a certain simplicity and freedom from self-consciousness, in finding themselves without the religious beliefs and customs of those around them; to make them regard differences in these respects as very natural and ordinary matters, susceptible of an easy explanation. It is of course inevitable, unless they are brought up in cloistered seclusion, that they should hear much of the various articles of belief which we are anxious that they should not share. They will ask you whether the story of the creation of the universe is true; whether such and such miracles really happened; whether this person or that actually lived, and actually did all that he is said to have done. Plainly the right course is to tell them, without any agitation or excess or vehemence or too much elaboration, the simple truth in such matters exactly as it appears to one's own mind. There is no reason why they should not know the best parts of the Bible as well as they know the Iliad or Herodotus. There are many reasons why they should know them better. But one most important condition of this is constantly overlooked by people, who like to satisfy their intellectual vanity by scepticism, and at the same time to make their comfort safe by external conformity. If the Bible is to be taught only because it is a noble and most majestic monument of literature, it should be taught as that and no more. That a man who regards it solely us supreme literature, should impress it upon the young as the supernaturally inspired word of God and the accurate record of objective occurrences, is a piece of the plainest and most shocking dishonesty. Let a youth be trained in simple and straightforward recognition of the truth that we can know, and can conjecture, nothing with any assurance as to the ultimate mysteries of things. Let his imagination and his sense of awe be fed from those springs, which are none the less bounteous because they flow in natural rather than supernatural channels. Let him be taught the historic place and source of the religions which he is not bound to accept, unless the evidence for their authority by and by brings him to another mind. A boy or girl trained in this way has an infinitely better chance of growing up with the true spirit and leanings of religion implanted in the character, than if they had been educated in formulae which they could not understand, by people who do not believe them.

The most common illustration of a personal mistake being made the base of a general doctrine, is found in the case of those who, after committing themselves for life to the profession of a given creed, awake to the shocking discovery that the creed has ceased to be true for them. The action of a popular modern story, Mrs. Gaskell's North and South, turns upon the case of a clergyman whoso faith is overthrown, and who in consequence abandons his calling, to his own serious material detriment and under circumstances of severe suffering to his family. I am afraid that current opinion, especially among the cultivated class, would condemn such a sacrifice as a piece of misplaced scrupulosity. No man, it would be said, is called upon to proclaim his opinions, when to do so will cost him the means of subsistence. This will depend upon the value which he sets upon the opinions that be has to proclaim. If such a proposition is true, the world must efface its habit of admiration for the martyrs and heroes of the past, who embraced violent death rather than defile themselves by a lying confession. Or is present heroism ridiculous, and only past heroism admirable? However, nobody has a right to demand the heroic from all the world; and if to publish his dissent from the opinions which he nominally holds would reduce a man to beggary, human charity bids us say as little as may be. We may leave such men to their unfortunate destiny, hoping that they will make what good use of it may be possible. Non ragioniam di lor. These cases only show the essential and profound immorality of the priestly profession—in all its forms, and no matter in connection with what church or what dogma—which makes a man's living depend on his abstaining from using his mind, or concealing the conclusions to which use of his mind has brought him. The time will come when society will look back on the doctrine, that they who serve the altar should live by the altar, as a doctrine of barbarism and degradation.

But if one, by refusing to offer a pinch of incense to the elder gods, should thus strip himself of a marked opportunity of exerting an undoubtedly useful influence over public opinion, or over a certain section of society, is he not justified in compromising to the extent necessary to preserve this influence? Instead of answering this directly, we would make the following remarks. First, it can seldom be clear in times like our own that religious heterodoxy must involve the loss of influence in other than religious spheres. The apprehension that it will do so is due rather to timorousness and a desire to find a fair reason for the comforts of silence and reserve. If a teacher has anything to tell the world in science, philosophy, history, the world will not be deterred from listening to him by knowing that he does not walk in the paths of conventional theology. Second, what influence can a man exert, that should seem to him more useful than that of a protester against what he counts false opinions, in the most decisive and important of all regions of thought? Surely if any one is persuaded, whether rightly or wrongly, that his fellows are expending the best part of their imaginations and feelings on a dream and a delusion, and that by so doing moreover they are retarding to an indefinite degree the wider spread of light and happiness, then nothing that he can tell them about chemistry or psychology or history can in his eyes be comparable in importance to the duty of telling them this. There is no advantage nor honest delight in influence, if it is only to be exerted in the sphere of secondary objects, and at the cost of the objects which ought to be foremost in the eyes of serious people. In truth the men who have done most for the world have taken very little heed of influence. They have sought light, and left their influence to fare as it might list. Can we not imagine the mingled mystification and disdain with which a Spinosa or a Descartes, a Luther or a Pascal, would have listened to an exhortation in our persuasive modern manner on the niceties of the politic and the social obligation of pious fraud? It is not given to many to perform the achievements of such giants as these, but every one may help to keep the standard of intellectual honesty at a lofty pitch, and what better service can a man render than to furnish the world with an example of faithful dealing with his own conscience and with his fellows? This at least is the one talent that is placed in the hands of the obscurest of us all.^[26]

And what is this smile of the world, to win which we are bidden to sacrifice our moral manhood; this frown of the world, whose terrors are more awful than the withering up of truth and the slow going out of light within the souls of us? Consider the triviality of life and conversation and purpose, in the bulk of those whose approval is held out for our prize and the mark of our high calling. Measure, if you can, the empire over them of prejudice unadulterated by a single element of rationality, and weigh, if you can, the huge burden of custom, unrelieved by a single leavening particle of fresh thought. Ponder the share which selfishness and love of ease have in the vitality and the maintenance of the opinions that we are forbidden to dispute. Then how pitiful a thing seems the approval or disapproval of these creatures of the conventions of the hour, as one figures the merciless vastness of the universe of matter sweeping us headlong through viewless space; as one hears the wail of misery that is for ever ascending to the deaf gods; as one counts the little tale of the years that separate us from eternal silence. In the light of these things, a man should surely dare to live his small span of life with little heed of the common speech upon him or his life, only caring that his days may be full of reality, and his conversation of truth-speaking and wholeness.

Those who think conformity in the matters of which we have been speaking harmless and unimportant, must do so either from indifference or else from despair. It is difficult to convince any one who is possessed by either one or other of these two evil spirits. Men who have once accepted them, do not easily relinquish philosophies that relieve their professors from disagreeable obligations of courage and endeavour. To the indifferent person one can say nothing. We can only acquiesce in that deep and terrible scripture, 'He that is filthy, let him be filthy still.' To those who despair of human improvement or the spread of light in the face of the huge mass of brute prejudice, we can only urge that the enormous weight and the firm hold of baseless prejudice and false commonplace are the very reasons which make it so important that those who are not of the night nor of the darkness should the more strenuously insist on living their own lives in the daylight. To those, finally, who do not despair, but think that the new faith will come so slowly that it is not worth while for the poor mortal of a day to make himself a martyr, we may suggest that the new faith when it comes will be of little worth, unless it has been shaped by generations of honest and fearless men, and unless it finds in those who are to receive it an honest and fearless temper. Our plea is not for a life of perverse disputings or busy proselytising, but only that we should learn to look at one another with a clear and steadfast eye, and march forward along the paths we choose with firm step and erect front. The first advance towards either the renovation of one faith or the growth of another, must be the abandonment of those habits of hypocritical conformity and compliance which have filled the air of the England of to-day with gross and obscuring mists.

FOOTNOTES:[18]

It may be said that Hume meant no more than this: that of two equally oppressed nations, the one which had been taught to assent to the doctrine of resistance would be more likely to practise 'the sacred duty of insurrection' than the other, from whom the doctrine had been concealed. Or, in other words, that the first would rise against oppression, when the oppression had reached a pitch which to the second would still seem bearable. The answer to Hume's proposition, interpreted in this way, would be that if the doctrine of resistance be presented to the populace in its true shape,—if it be 'truth,' as he admits,—then the application of it in practice should be as little likely to prove mischievous as that of any other truth. If the gist of the remark be that this is a truth which the populace is especially likely to apply wrongly, in consequence of its ignorance, passion, and heedlessness, we may answer by appealing to history, which is rather a record of excessive patience in the various nations of the earth than of excessive petulance.