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Updated: May 28, 2025
If I believe in the beginning what Bernard Shaw has found out thus late in the day, that priests are not as bad as they are painted, the free-thinker would deny me intellectual freedom. The fact of my right to think the matter out and come to that conclusion would count for nothing.
Comparing this church with those cathedrals, I perceived that I was more of a Catholic than I had believed myself to be, and I felt the truth of those words of Castelar: "Well, yes, I am a free-thinker, but if some day I were to return to a religion, I would return to the splendid one of my fathers, and not to this squalid and nude doctrine that saddens my eyes and my heart."
To do the Astons credit, their objection to Violet did not rest wholly upon an imagined social disparity; there was a much graver reason. The girl lost no opportunity in proclaiming herself a pronounced Free-thinker. Her mother had died while she was quite a child, and for her upbringing Violet had depended wholly upon her father an ardent Socialist as well as Atheist.
To him in these early years religion presented itself as a supernatural despotism based on terror and coercion. Its central doctrine was eternal punishment, and when in mature life, Godwin became a free-thinker, his revolt was not so much the readjustment of a speculative thinker who has reconsidered untenable dogmas, as the rebellion of a humane and liberal mind against a system of terrorism.
Franklin was only the most distinguished of those who read with pleasure the Queen Anne poets and essayists, who learned in Tillotson that theology might be compatible with reason and common sense, or in Shaftesbury that an enlightened free-thinker might still be a gentleman and a man of virtue.
On his return he told his niece that he found everything much as usual. "Thoph Kenney's raised a beard 'cause shavin's so expensive; and the Come-Outer minister called the place the other denominations are bound for 'Hades, and his congregation are thinkin' of firin' him for turnin' Free-Thinker. That's about all the sensations," he said. "I couldn't get around town much on account of Abbie.
It was characteristic of the man that among all the gay, profligate scholars of the Italian Renascence he chose as the object of his admiration the disciple of Savonarola, Pico di Mirandola. Free-thinker as the bigots who listened to his daring speculations termed him, his eye would brighten and his tongue falter as he spoke with friends of heaven and the after-life.
Its body doctrine should be Love of God, Charity for man, Truth, Honor, Purity. They embrace all that is blessed and beautiful, gracious and great in every sect, science and philosophy known to man. These are "points of doctrine" upon which there can be no dissension; Buddhist and Mohammedan, Jew and Gentile, Catholic and Calvinist, philosopher and "free-thinker," will all approve.
A man with a flint and steel striking sparks over a wet blanket is one thing, and striking them over a tinder-box is another. The free Englishman is born under protest; he lives and dies under protest, a tolerated, but not a welcome fact. Is not free-thinker a term of reproach in England?
It may be disputed, but, admitting it, one may ask: Is there no place among Christian people for those distinctive virtues on which we base the superiority of our religion? When the need is greatest, should the practice be less urgent? It is not evident that the free-thinker is obliged by any of his principles to give better example. It is evident the Christian is so obliged.
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