The use of this word “jealousy” looks like an attack upon the nonconformists, but it is not employed here in a hostile sense. If jealousy is a mental aberration when it makes people see falsely, it is not so when there is no perversion of facts. Nay, there may be circumstances when an awakened jealousy casts a clear light on unpleasant truths which would otherwise escape us. It is not in human nature that communities placed in a position of manifest social inferiority should not be jealous of the one community whose predominance makes them inferior. It _is_ in human nature that, even when there is no active oppression, the inferior communities should desire a change which would relieve them from a degrading name. [Sidenote: Opinion of Intellectual Freethinkers.] The intellectual freethinker is not usually, in England, at all eager for disestablishment. The existence of a broadly tolerant State Church is not, from his point of view, a very great hindrance to liberty of thought. What he most dreads is a watchful universal inquisition, in which every man and especially every woman is an inquisitor always ready to examine him as to his opinions, and call him to account for omissions in religious “exercises.” A distinguished Englishman of this class, a scientific agnostic, said to me, “It would be a mistake to bring on disestablishment. The Church is more tolerant than the dissenters. The English state of things is more favourable to individual liberty than the American.” CHAPTER III SOCIAL POWER [Sidenote: The Test of Social Power.] What I mean by the social power of a religion is the power of enforcing conformity by the double sanction of social rewards and penalties. If the clergy can improve the social position of one who submits to them, and if they can inflict upon the nonconformist any, even the slightest, stigma of social inferiority, then I should say that such a clergy was socially powerful. It would be still more powerful if it did not appear in the matter in any direct way, but was able to attain the same ends through a laity influenced and educated by itself, a laity acting under the illusion of perfect freedom like a hypnotised patient under the influence of “suggestion.” We have seen that there is a plurality of established religions in France, that Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Jews are equally recognised by the State. The political equality of these religions is perfect, but is their social equality of the same kind? [Sidenote: Absence of Social Equality amongst Religions in France.]