who straggle and scatter. We are like a comet, bright at
the head but tailing away into mere gas behind. However,
every man may speak for himself, and I do not feel that
your charge comes home to me. I am only bigoted against
bigotry, and that I hold to be as legitimate as violence
to the violent. When one considers what effect the
perversion of the religious instinct has had during the
history of the world; the bitter wars, Christian and
Mahomedan, Catholic and Protestant; the persecutions, the
torturings, the domestic hatreds, the petty spites, with
ALL creeds equally blood-guilty, one cannot but be
amazed that the concurrent voice of mankind has not
placed bigotry at the very head of the deadly sins. It
is surely a truism to say that neither smallpox nor
the plague have brought the same misery upon mankind.
I cannot be bigoted, my dear boy, when I say from the
bottom of my heart that I respect every good Catholic and
every good Protestant, and that I recognise that each of
these forms of faith has been a powerful instrument in
the hands of that inscrutable Providence which rules all
things. Just as in the course of history one finds that
the most far-reaching and admirable effects may proceed
from a crime; so in religion, although a creed be founded
upon an entirely inadequate conception of the Creator and
His ways, it may none the less be the very best practical
thing for the people and age which have adopted it.
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