modern times and in communities claiming to be free, political disabilities, social reprobation, and the stigma of disqualification as witnesses have been imposed upon persons entertaining certain views on theological questions. But these persecutions may have compelled the suppression or disavowal of obnoxious opinions, and may have made hypocrites; they never changed belief, or produced any other conviction than that of wrong and outrage. The soul itself is beyond the reach of any human authority, not to be conquered by any device of terror or torture. Difference of opinion is unfortunately the ground of natural aversion among men; and it requires much enlightenment and liberal training to enable society to overcome this universal prejudice and to inaugurate complete and absolute toleration. 'In the present state of knowledge,' says Buckle, the historian, 'the majority of people are so ill informed, as not to be aware of the true nature of belief; they are not aware that all belief is involuntary and is entirely governed by the circumstances which produce it. What we call the will has no power over belief, and consequently a man is nowise responsible for his creed, except in so far as he is responsible for the events which gave him his creed.' It may be doubted whether the majority of people are quite so ignorant as Mr. Buckle here represents them; for the conflict between beliefs is rather the result of feeling or passion than of judgment. Because men who differ in opinion hate each other, it does not follow that they must therefore deny the right to freedom of thought, or maintain that belief may be changed at will. The red man and the white man may cordially hate each other; but it would hardly be accurate to say that the former denies the right of the latter to his color, or thinks him morally responsible for it. Yet men are quite as much responsible for the color of their skin as for the character of their honest convictions, and they have almost equal power to control the one or the other. In truth, the hatred arising from conflict of opinion is not the offspring of thought, but of emotion. It is chiefly a derangement of the affections; not so much an error of the reason. The most unenlightened man has the innate conviction that he is entitled to his peculiar belief, because it is impossible for him to admit any other; nor is it at all natural or necessary that one individual should question the sincerity of another's opinion on any subject, because it differs from his own. Intolerance in this particular has been the result mostly of interference and usurpation--the consequence of that theological despotism to which men have, in some form or other, in all ages, been more or less subjected.