And now, after the “expostulations” to which you have been subjected elsewhere, your convictions treated as sins, and the exercise of your conscientious judgment represented as exposing you to the wrath of a holy God, (strange combination of ideas, wrath and holiness!) I may, perhaps, not unbecomingly address a few words to you my fellow-believers. Trinitarians have the power to deny you the _name_ of Christians; but they have not the power to deny you the Reality. They cannot prevent you _being_ Christians; and it is a light thing for you to be judged by man’s judgment, provided only you can disprove the judgment by preserving your Christianity unprovoked, by retaining your Christian love towards those who deny you the Christian name. The worst operation of persecution and fanaticism is its tendency to produce a reaction. The worst working of an Evil Spirit is that it calls up other evil spirits to oppose it. The temper we complain of has a tendency to provoke the same temper in ourselves. And yet an evil spirit cannot be conquered by an evil spirit. This is one of the divine prerogatives of the spirit of goodness. You must overcome evil with good. You must be prepared to expect that men who deem themselves your religious superiors, will comport themselves accordingly. You must regard it as only natural that men who hold themselves to be the favourites of God, and never expect to meet you in heaven, should treat you with little respect on earth. Nay, you must even have some tenderness for the feelings of irritation which this very faith cannot fail to generate in the kindlier nature of those who hold it. Holding you to be lost, and having human hearts, how can they avoid assailing you with eager, anxious, and even persecuting aggression? I blame them not for this: I only wonder there is so little of it: that they leave us to our fate, with so little effort, to use their own favourite figure, to pluck the brands from the burning. Nay, my friends, more than this, their confidence in their own salvation depending on the dogmatical assurance with which they hold certain doctrinal ideas, they are naturally alarmed lest this _essential faith_ should in any way be disturbed in their bosoms, and they come to look upon every freer mind as a tempter and an enemy. And as their Faith is by their own boast not a _rational_ Faith, as it has no roots in their intellectual nature, they feel that their danger is all the greater, and that their caution must be all the more. They are not happy in their exclusive faith. How can they if they have Christian hearts? It rests upon an evidence out of themselves, so that they cannot, at all times, be confident in it. It presents to them many unhappy images, a vindictive God,[149] an exclusive Heaven, a condemned world, fellow-beings against whom their religious feelings are embittered, but towards whom their hearts still yearn. All these are reasons why you should exercise forbearance. You have an easier part.