Indulge every one with civil toleration—_Archbishop Fénelon to the Duke of Burgundy._ Compulsion in religion proves the spirit which dictates it to be an enemy to truth.—_Dirois, a Doctor of the Sorbonne_, b. vi. chap. iv. Compulsion may make hypocrites, but never can persuade.—_Tillemont’s Hist. Eccles._ tom. vi. We have thought it conformable to equity and right reason to walk in the paths of the ancient church which never used violence to establish or extend religion.—_Remonstrance of the Parliament of Paris to Henry II._ Experience teaches us that violence is more likely to irritate than to cure a distemper which is seated in the mind.—_De Thou’s Epistle Dedicatory to Henry IV._ Faith is not inspired by the edge of the sword.—_Cerisier, in the Reigns of Henry IV. and Louis XIII._ It is a barbarous zeal which pretends to force any religion upon the mind, as if persuasion could be produced by constraint.— _Boulainvillier’s State of France._ It is with religion as with love; command can do nothing, constraint still less; nothing is so independent as love and belief.—_Amelot de la Houssaye on Cardinal Ossat’s Letters._ If Providence has been so kind to you as to give you a knowledge of the truth, receive it as an instance of His great goodness; but should those who enjoy the inheritance of their father hate those who do not?—_Spirit of Laws_, book xxv. One might compose an immense volume of such passages. All our histories, discourses, sermons, moral treatises and catechisms of the present time abound with and inculcate this holy doctrine of indulgence. What fatality, what false reason, then, leads us to contradict by our practice the theory we are every day teaching? When our actions give the lie to our morals it must certainly proceed from our thinking it to our interest to practise the contrary of what we teach; but what advantage can arise from persecuting those who do not think in the same manner as we do, and thereby making ourselves hated by them? Once more, then, let me repeat it; there is the highest absurdity in persecution. It may be replied that those who found it to their interest to lay a restraint upon the consciences of others are not absurd in so doing. To such men I address the following chapter. CHAPTER XVI. A CONVERSATION BETWEEN A DYING MAN AND ONE IN GOOD HEALTH. An inhabitant of a country village lying at the point of death was visited by a person in good health, who came to insult him in his last moments, with the following speech: