The reply to Benjamin Constant is that it is one thing to believe that one knows the way to salvation and another thing to force others to walk in that way. The priest looks upon himself as the physician of the soul; to wish to minister by violence to an ailing soul, “is quite as if,” it has been said, “the physician of the body for greater certainty should take the precaution of having his patient condemned to death or to hard labor in case of disobedience to his prescriptions.”[51] Assuredly it would involve a contradiction in terms for the physician of the body to wish to bring it to death; but it in nowise involves a contradiction for the physician of the soul to wish to put constraint upon the body. The objection falls of its own weight. For the rest, let us not deceive ourselves; if the physicians of the body leave their patients free, it is sometimes that they cannot help so doing, simply; in certain grave cases they insist on having the patient under their control in a hospital, which is, after all, a sort of prison. If a European physician had to prescribe for one of those American Indians, whose habit it is in an attack of smallpox, when the fever reaches forty degrees, to plunge into the water to refresh themselves, the first thing he would do would be to strap his patient to his cot. And every physician would like really to be able to proceed after the same fashion, even in Europe, even at the present day, with people like Gambetta, Mirabeau, and many others less illustrious, who kill themselves by negligence. [51] M. Franck, _Des rapports de la religion et de l’État_. [Sidenote: Intolerance a perverted charity.] Besides, one must not reason as if the believer could isolate himself and act only for himself. For example, to a Catholic what is the meaning of absolute liberty of choice in education? It means the right of parents to damn their children. Is this right thus permissible in their eyes? There are books calculated to destroy faith; books by Voltaire, or Strauss, or Renan; books which, if circulated, result in our losing our souls, “a thing far more grave than the death of the body,” as Théodore de Bèze said, after St. Augustine. Can a nation truly penetrated by a Christian charity allow such books to be circulated on the pretext of liberty of conscience? No; one must before all else deliver the very will from the bonds of heresy and error; it is on this condition only that it can be free. Moreover, one must prevent the corrupt conscience from corrupting others. We see plainly that charitable intolerance is justified from an exclusively theological point of view. It rests on logical reasonings of which the point of departure alone is vicious.[52]