blasphemous apostate and then worshipped as a prophet.

Here the law for the child is the same as for the adult. The high priest
must not rend his garments and cry "Crucify him" when he is shocked:
the atheist must not clamor for the suppression of Law's Serious Call
because it has for two centuries destroyed the natural happiness of
innumerable unfortunate children by persuading their parents that it is
their religious duty to be miserable. It, and the Sermon on the Mount,
and Machiavelli's Prince, and La Rochefoucauld's maxims, and Hymns
Ancient and Modern, and De Glanville's apologue, and Dr. Watts's rhymes,
and Nietzsche's Gay Science, and Ingersoll's Mistakes of Moses, and the
speeches and pamphlets of the people who want us to make war on
Germany, and the Noodle's Orations and articles of our politicians and
journalists, must all be tolerated not only because any of them may for
all we know be on the right track but because it is in the conflict of
opinion that we win knowledge and wisdom. However terrible the wounds
suffered in that conflict, they are better than the barren peace of
death that follows when all the combatants are slaughtered or bound hand
and foot.

The difficulty at present is that though this necessity for Toleration
is a law of political science as well established as the law of
gravitation, our rulers are never taught political science: on the
contrary, they are taught in school that the master tolerates nothing
that is disagreeable to him; that ruling is simply being master; and
that the master's method is the method of violent punishment. And our
citizens, all school taught, are walking in the same darkness. As I
write these lines the Home Secretary is explaining that a man who has
been imprisoned for blasphemy must not be released because his remarks
were painful to the feelings of his pious fellow townsmen. Now it