Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.

Bigotry

A man must be excessively stupid, as well as uncharitable, who believes there is no virtue but on his own side.

Mr. T. sees religion not as a sphere, but as a line; and it is the identical line in which he is moving. He is like an African buffalo,—sees right forward, but nothing on the right hand or the left. He would not perceive a legion of angels or of devils at the distance of ten yards on one side or the other.

Any sect whose reasonings, interpretations, and language I have been used to will, of course, make all chime that way; and make another, and perhaps the genuine, meaning of the author seem harsh, strange, and uncouth to me.

One muffled up in the infallibility of his sect will not enter into debate with a person who will question any of those things which to him are sacred.

How ready zeal for interest and party is to charge atheism on those who will not, without examining, submit and blindly follow their nonsense!

It is true that he professed himself a supporter of toleration. Every sect clamours for toleration when it is down. We have not the smallest doubt that when Bonner was in the Marshalsea he thought it a very hard thing that a man should be locked up in a gaol for not being able to understand the words “This is my body” in the same way with the lords of the council. It would not be very wise to conclude that a beggar is full of Christian charity because he assures you that God will reward you if you give him a penny; or that a soldier is humane because he cries out lustily for quarter when a bayonet is at his throat. The doctrine which, from the very first origin of religious dissensions, has been held by bigots of all sects, when condensed into a few words and stripped of rhetorical disguise, is simply this: I am in the right, and you are in the wrong. When you are the stronger, you ought to tolerate me; for it is your duty to tolerate truth. But when I am the stronger, I shall persecute you; for it is my duty to persecute error.

Unhappy those who hunt for a party, and scrape together out of every author all those things only which favour their own tenets.

He that considers and inquires into the reason of things is counted a foe to received doctrines.

We ought to bring our minds free, unbiassed, and teachable, to learn our religion from the word of God.