Identifier: storyofourchrist00bird (find matches)
Title: The story of our Christianity; an account of the struggles, persecutions, wars, and victories of Christians of all times
Year: 1893 (1890s)
Authors: Bird, Frederic Mayer, 1838-1908 Harrison, Benjamin, 1833-1901
Subjects: Church history
Publisher: Philadelphia, Pa., Peerless Publishing Co.
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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on one another in their Masters name, let uspause a moment to digest the most brilliant and instructive passage of thisadmirable book : It is unnatural and unreasonable to persecute disagreeing opinions. Un-natural ; for understanding, being a thing wholly spiritual, cannot be restrained,and therefore neither punished, by corporal afflictions. It is in aliena republica,a matter of another world. You may as well cure the colic by brushing a mansclothes, or fill a mans belly with a syllogism. These things do not communi-cate in matter, and therefore neither in action nor passion ; and since all punish-ments, in a prudent government, punish the offender to prevent a future crime,and so it proves more medicinal than vindictive, the punitive act being in orderto the cure and prevention; and since no punishment of the body can cure adisease in the soul, it is disproportionable in nature ; and in all civil government,to punish where the punishment can do no good, it may be an act of tyranny.
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3i6 THE STORY OF OUR CHRISTIANITY. hut never of justice. For is an opinion ever the more true or false for being per-secuted ? Some men have believed it the more, as being provoked into a confi-dence and vexed into a resolution ; but the thing itself is not the truer; and thoughthe hangman may confute a man with an inexplicable dilemma, yet not convincehis understanding: for such premises can infer no conclusion but that of amans life; and a wolf may as well give laws to the understanding as he whose■dictates are only propounded in violence and writ in blood. And a dog is ascapable of a law as a man, if there be no choice in his obedience, nor discoursein his choice, nor reason to satisfy his discourse. And as it is unnatural, so it is unreasonable that Sempronius should forceCains to be of his opinion because Sempronius is consul this year and commandsthe lictors ; as if he that can kill a man cannot but be infallible: and if he benot, why should I do violence to my conscience beca

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