ligious bodies[1]; in Spain the bishops are constantly urging the extirpation of Freemasons and Agnostics; across the Atlantic the Mormons have been stringently repressed, and in England legal penalties are enforced against Christian scientists. " Conscientious scruples" cannot excuse crimes against the State or society at large. We do not all of us subscribe to the wisdom of the legislation of 1898 on vaccination.
Our own country is probably now one of the most tolerant in the world— especially in regard to those aspects of religion in which continental countries are most intolerant. Since 1880 secularist lectures gain a very fair hearing, and their meetings are rarely interrupted, though it is hardly a hundred years since Dr Priestley, the Unitarian, had his library burnt in Birmingham by the mob for being an atheistic revolutionary. But no greater measure of tolerance was accorded to the pro-Boer meetings of 1899 and 1900 than to the orations of Mr Holy-oake fifty years before, and a policy of intolerance was deliberately sanctioned by some of the authorities at the time.
Moreover, although the violence of the clerical and anti-clerical parties on the Continent seems inconsistent with the existence of a widespread
- ↑ It may be noted that the French legislation of 1901 concerning religious associations was merely a revival of similar enactments in Portugal in 1834.
