Coleridge’s canon has always seemed to me perfectly to cover the ground. “Tolerate no belief,” he says, “which you deem false and of injurious tendency, but arraign no belief. The man is more and other than his belief, and God only knows how large or how small a part of him the belief in man may be.” But liberality in the statement of facts—there we want exactness, we want earnestness, we want precise fidelity to the truth of things; and there is no opportunity for what calls itself liberality there. How is it less liberal to tell a man that strychnine will kill him than to tell him that it will certainly give him a pain in his stomach? [Laughter.] How is it less liberal to tell a man that if he goes over Niagara he goes to a sure death, than it is to tell him that if he takes that awful plunge he will almost certainly wet his feet. [Laughter.] No! When a man comes to me and says, “These are the liberal doctrines; there is not probably any God; we do not know where men come from; there is no law above him; there is no retribution—or if there be any, it is a small one—waiting for him,” I say, I perfectly understand your doctrines. There is no reason why I should not. There is nothing immense or complex or mysterious about them,—in fact, they are rather thin. [Laughter.] They remind one of the pillows which one of the waiters stole at a White Mountain hotel where they didn’t have very solid pillows. They knew he stole them, because they found them on him, both of them, in his waistcoat pocket. [Laughter.] We carry these doctrines very easily in our thought and hand. There is nothing massive or majestic about them; there is nothing liberal in them. If a man is true to his convictions, he is true to them; and he has no right to be liberal in the way of giving away a part of what he believes, or hiding it under any mystery of words and imposing upon men with a thought which is not really his. And when I look at the drift and working of such doctrines, I find at once that they tend to build no grand characters; they give no motive to men for repentance and faith; they do not seek, they do not tend, to lift man nearer to the level of the holiness and happiness of God on high; they work only in degradation of character; they authorize and encourage men to imitate their grandfathers, which, on that system of doctrine, is to make beasts of themselves. [Laughter.]