Liberty, therefore, cannot help being a courage to resist the demands of power at some point that is deemed decisive; and, because of this, liberty, also, is an inescapable doctrine of contingent anarchy. It is always a threat to those who operate the engines of authority that prohibition of experience will be denied. It is always an assertion that he who has learned from life some lesson he takes to be truth will seek to live that lesson unless he can be persuaded of its falsehood. Punishment may persuade some to abandon the effort; and others may be driven by its imposition to conceal their impulse to act upon the view they take. But persecution, however thoroughgoing, will never, over any long period, be able to suppress significant truth. If the principles that are urged by a few correspond to some widespread experience those who recognize the expression of their experience will inevitably reaffirm it. It has been the historic character of persecution always to degrade the persecutor and to strengthen the persecuted by drawing attention to their claims. The only way to deal with novelty is to understand it, and the only way to deal with grievance is to seek a remedy for the complaint it embodies. To deny novelty or grievance a right of expression is a certain, if, indeed, an ultimate, validation of the truth they contain. We have, it appears, to learn this anew in each generation. We grant toleration in one part of the field only to deny it in another. We grant it in religion to deny it in politics; we grant it in politics, to deny it in economic matters. Each age finds that the incidence of freedom is significant at some special point, and there, once more, the lesson of freedom has to be learned. Each age makes some idol in its own image and sacrifices upon its altar the freedom of those who refuse it worship. Ultimately, that denial is always made upon the same ground: it is insisted that the doctrines or practices attacked are subversive of the civil order. The intolerance may be Catholic, when it insists that a unity of outlook is essential for the preservation of society; or it may be Protestant when, as with Calvin and the Socinians, it holds that the blasphemous nature of the belief anathematized destroys the reverence upon which society depends. The essence of the persecuting position is always that the persecutor has hold of truth and that he would betray its service by allowing it to be questioned. He is able, accordingly, to indulge in the twofold luxury not only of preserving his own authority, but also of assisting the persons attacked to enter, if they so choose, the way of truth.