self-preservation, and to train every creature to love every other creature a great deal better than itself, is pure maundering, and will then only be tolerated among men when a decadent humanity shall have entirely divorced piety from reason, and Buddhism instead of Christianity shall have become the religion of the most advanced pioneers of civilisation. But the most general excess which runs, so to speak, in the blood of Christian ethics, arises from the overflow of zeal without knowledge, at one time boiling over in floods of the most savage intolerance, at another ossified into the rigid features of the most unrelenting bigotry. This is an evil which springs naturally from the connexion of morality with religion; and it is an evil of so enormous a magnitude that it seems in some sort to supply an excuse for those inadequate ethical systems of recent growth which take no cognisance of the reverential and devout {249} instincts of human nature, and, after the model of Aristotle, would build up an architecture of Ethics without piety. And if religious zeal generally is prone to run into intolerance, it is specially so in the case of monotheism. For monotheism is naturally intolerant; it will bear no assessor on the supreme throne; if true, it is exclusively true. And this is indeed no more than what it is entitled to; but it should be intolerant only of polytheism as a system, not uncharitable to polytheists as men; whereas it has become almost a proverb that the zeal of Christian theologians stands divorced not only from charity, but from truth; of all disputants men of the clerical profession are the most unfair, so much so, that among churchmen as a class candour is scarcely a mentionable virtue. A candid evangelist is generally a black sheep to his brethren; assuredly he will not be found prominent in Church debates, or forward as a leader of Church parties. But neither must we bear too hard upon the clergy in this matter. It is human nature, in fact, more than clerical inoculation that is to blame; and we shall find if we look round with an impartial eye, that humanitarian democrats, anti-church Radicals, scientific crotchet-mongers, mathematical formulists, and conceited young poets, are equally intolerant in their own way; only religion, like love, by the very intensity of its excellence, raises the natural intolerance of human nature to its highest power; it is so pleasant to stamp the name of God upon our passions and ride triumphantly over the world in the character of armed apostles of the most sacred truth. Hence religious wars, which, as all the world knows, have generally proved the most bitter and sanguinary; hence conquests, robberies, {250} and oppressions in the name of the God of Christians; which for systematic cruelty, treachery, and all manner of baseness, have not been surpassed in the annals of Spartan helotage or Venetian espionage; hence assumptions of infallibility which make reason blush, and