persecution must be shared by all parties then, and by none more than by the party which in general terms most denounced it. Those who think the Hampden agitation unique in its injustice ought to ask themselves what their party would have done if at any time between 1836 and 1843 Mr. Newman had been placed in Dr. Hampden's seat. People in our days mean by religious persecution what happens when the same sort of repressive policy is applied to a religious party as is applied to vaccination recusants, or to the "Peculiar People." All religious persecution, from the days of Socrates, has taken a legal form, and justified itself on legal grounds. It is the action of authority, or of strong social judgments backed by authority, against a set of opinions, or the expression of them in word or act--usually innovating opinions, but not by any means necessarily such. The disciples of M. Monod, the "Momiers" of Geneva, were persecuted by the Liberals of Geneva, not because they broke away from the creed of Calvin, but because they adhered to it. The word is not properly applied to the incidental effects in the way of disadvantage, resulting from some broad constitutional settlement--from the government of the Church being Episcopal and not Presbyterian, or its creed Nicene and not Arian--any more than it is persecution for a nation to change its government, or for a legitimist to have to live under a republic, or for a Christian to have to live in an infidel state, though persecution may follow from these conditions. But the _privilegium_ passed against Dr. Hampden was an act of persecution, though a mild one compared with what afterwards fell on his opponents with his full sanction. Persecution is the natural impulse, in those who think a certain thing right and important or worth guarding, to disable those who, thinking it wrong, are trying to discredit and upset it, and to substitute something different. It implies a state of war, and the resort to the most available weapons to inflict damage on those who are regarded as rebellious and dangerous. These weapons were formidable enough once: they are not without force still. But in its mildest form--personal disqualification or proscription--it is a disturbance which only war justifies. It may, of course, make itself odious by its modes of proceeding, by meanness and shabbiness and violence, by underhand and ignoble methods of misrepresentation and slander, or by cruelty and plain injustice; and then the odium of these things fairly falls upon it. But it is very hard to draw the line between conscientious repression, feeling itself bound to do what is possible to prevent mischief, and what those who are opposed, if they are the weaker party, of course call persecution.