Does this make me a Baptist, I wonder?
I fear not, I fear not; because I am unable to rid myself of the impression
that there are many roads leading to heaven, and I have never believed in
what is called close communion. I have not hated and am unable to hate any
man because either in political or in religious opinion he differs from
me and insists upon voting his party ticket and worshiping his Creator
according to his conscience. Perfect freedom of conscience and thought has
been my lifelong contention.
I suppose I must have been born an insurrecto. Pursuing the story of the
dark ages when men were burnt at the stake for the heresy of refusing to
bow to the will of the majority, it is not the voice of the Protestant or
the Catholic that issues from the flames and reaches my heart, but the cry
of suffering man, my brother. To me a saint is a saint whether he wears
wooden shoes or goes barefoot, whether he gets his baptism silently out
of a font of consecrated water or comes dripping from the depths of
the nearest brook, shouting, "Glory hallelujah!" From my boyhood the
persecution of man for opinion's sake--and no matter for what opinion's
sake--has roused within me the only devil I have ever personally known.
My reading has embraced not a few works which seek or which affect to deal
with the mystery of life and death. Each and every one of them leaves a
mystery still. For all their learning and research--their positivity and
contradiction--none of the writers know more than I think I know myself,
and all that I think I know myself may be abridged to the simple rescript,
I know nothing.
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