'
Few religious persons are liberal as this empress, whose strong good
sense seems to have been fully a match for her bad education: that
education was Christian. She was taught to loathe the opinions, aye, and
the persons, of heretics, under which denomination may be included all
dissenters from religious truth as it was in her, or rather in the
church of which she was chief member. No other kind of teaching is
accounted orthodox in our 'land of Bibles' than that of state paid
priests of law established religion. Look at the true Church of
England's Thirty-Nine Articles. Do they not abound in anathema, and
literally teem with the venom of intolerance? Do they not shock the
better feelings even of those who believe them divine? The truth is, all
priests teach religion which no wit can reconcile with reason, and very
many of them make their followers believe, and perhaps believe
themselves, that to villify, abuse, and hunt down 'infidels,' are acts
acceptable in the sight of God. The idea of compensating poor
unbelievers in this world by an extra quantum of comfort for the
torments they are doomed to suffer in the next, never enters their head.
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