But it is not true that a change such as that involved here necessarily "takes thousands of years." I have already dealt with the plea, but would recall only one incident that I have cited: a scene painted by a Spanish artist of the Court and nobles and populace in a great European city, gathered on a public holiday as for a festival to see a beautiful child burned to death for a faith that, as it plaintively said, it had sucked in with its mother's milk. How long separates us from that scene? Why, not the lives of three ordinarily elderly people. And how long after that scene--which was not an isolated incident of uncommon kind, but a very everyday matter, typical of the ideas and feelings of the time at which it was enacted--was it before the renewal of such became a practical impossibility? It was not a hundred years. It was enacted in 1680, and within the space of a short lifetime the world knew that never again would a child be burned alive as the result of a legal condemnation by a duly constituted Court, and as a public festival, witnessed by the King and the nobles and the populace, in one of the great cities of Europe. Or, do those who talk of "unchanging human nature" and "thousands of years" really plead that we are in danger of a repetition of such a scene? In that case our religious toleration is a mistake. Protestants stand in danger of such tortures, and should arm themselves with the old armory of religious combat--the rack, the thumbscrew, the iron maiden, and the rest--as a matter of sheer protection. "Men are savage, bloodthirsty creatures, and will fight for a word or a sign," the _Spectator_ tells us, when their patriotism is involved. Well, until yesterday, it was as true to say that of them when their religion was involved. Patriotism is the religion of politics. And as one of the greatest historians of religious ideas has pointed out, religion and patriotism are the chief moral influences moving great bodies of men, and "the separate modifications and mutual interaction of these two agents may almost be said to constitute the moral history of mankind."[120]