"Taisez-vous. Hold your tongue," I said, without mitigation. If there is anything I cannot away with, it is trivial apostasy. I tolerate latitudinarianism when it is hereditary. Where people's fathers and mothers before them have been Pagans, and Catholics, and Mohammedans, you don't blame THEM for being so. You regret their error, and strive to lead them back into the right path; only they are not inflammatory. But to have people go out from the faith of their fathers with malice aforethought and their eyes open--well, that is not exactly what I mean either. That is a sorrowful, but not necessarily an exasperating thing. What I mean is this: I see people Orthodox from their cradles, (and probably only from their cradles, certainly not from their brains,) who think it is something pretty to become Unitarianistic. They don't become Unitarians, as they never were Orthodox, because they have not thought enough or sense enough to become or to be anything; but they like to make a stir and attract attention. They seem to think it indicates great liberality of character, and great breadth of view, to be continually flinging out against their own faith, ridiculing this, that, and the other point held by their Church, and shocking devout and simple-minded Orthodox by their quasi-profanity. Now for good Orthodox Christians I have a great respect; and for good Unitarian Christians I have a great respect; and for sincere, sad seekers, who can find no rest for the sole of their foot, I have a great respect; but for these Border State men, who are neither here nor there, on whom you never can lay your hand, because they are twittering everywhere, I have a profound contempt. I wish people to be either one thing or another. I desire them to believe something, and know what it is, and stick to it. I have no patience with this modern outcry against creeds. You hear people inveigh against them, without for a moment thinking what they are. They talk as if creeds were the head and front of human offending, the infallible sign of bigotry and hypocrisy, incompatible alike with piety and wisdom. Do not these wise men know that the thinkers and doers of the earth, in overwhelming majority, have been creed men? Creeds may exist without religion, but neither religion, nor philosophy, nor politics, nor society, can exist without creeds. There must be a creed in the head, or there cannot be religion in the heart. You must believe that Deity exists, before you can reverence Deity. You must believe in the fact of humanity, or you cannot love your fellows. A creed is but the concentration, the crystallization, of belief. Truth is of but little worth till it is so crystallized. Truth lying dissolved in oceans of error and nonsense and ignorance makes but a feeble diluent. It swashes everywhere, but to deluge, not to benefit. Precipitate it, and you have the salt of the earth. Political opposition, inorganic, is but a blind, cumbrous,