The Evils of Religious Force

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jun 26, 1889

FromThe American Sentinel, Vol. 4, No. 22.

The Evils of Religious Force

To employ force in propagating religion or maintaining it where it has been propagated, is to offer a dishonorable and pernicious service. To attempt compelling a man to become religious is itself a species of irreligion, and the absurdity of such an attempt is as flagrant as the iniquity of it. The timid may be compelled to a feigned assumption of what they neither understand nor approve; but the judgment, the conscience, and the affections, the abodes of religion or its opposite, are not within the reach of compulsion; error and vice have retreats from which nothing but truth and grace can banish them. The conduct of the religious despot is preposterous and infamous; his machinations and efforts tend to the extinction of all that is free, noble, and ingenious in man, and to the production of those pests to society, suspicion, servility, deceit, and hypocrisy.—Sel.