“If I could but get you to see it from what I am convinced is Erica's
point of view!” exclaimed Charles Osmond. “Forget for a minute that you
are her knight and champion, and try to see things as she sees them.
Let us try to reverse things. Just imagine for a minute that you are the
child of some leading man, the head and chief of a party or association
we'll say that you are the child of an Archbishop of Canterbury. You are
carefully educated, you become a zealous worker, you enter into all your
father's interests, you are able to help him in a thousand ways. But,
by slow degrees, we will say that you perceive a want in the system in
which you have been educated, and, after many years of careful study
and thought, you are obliged to reject your former beliefs and to accept
that other system which shall most recommend itself to you. We will
suppose for the sake of analogy that you become a secularist. Knowing
that your change of views will be a terrible grief to your father the
archbishop, it takes your whole strength to make your confession, and
you not only feel your father's personal pain, but you feel that his
pain will be increased by his public position. To make it worse, too, we
must suppose that a number of people calling themselves atheists, and
in the name of atheism, have at intervals for the last thirty years been
annoying and insulting your father, that in withstanding their attacks
he has often received bodily injury, and that the atheists have so often
driven him into the law courts that he has been pretty nearly beggared.
All his privations you have shared for instance, you went with him and
lived for years in a poky little lodging, and denied yourself every
single luxury. But now you have, in spite of all these persecutions
carried on in the name of secularism, learned to see that the highest
form of secularism is true. The archbishop feels this terribly. However,
being a very loving father, he wisely refuses to indulge in perpetual
controversy with his child. You agree still to live together, and each
try with all your might to find all the possible points of union still
left you. Probably, if you are such a child as I imagine, you love your
father ten times more than you did before. Then just as you have made up
your mind to try to be more to him, when all you care about in life is
to comfort and help him, and when your heart is much occupied with your
new opinions, a friend of yours a secularist comes to you, and says: 'A
miserable life lies before you. The atheists will never thoroughly
take up with you while you live with your father the archbishop, and
of course it is wretched for you to be surrounded by those of another
creed. Come with me. I love you I will make you happy, and save you from
persecution.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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