Terror is everywhere the beginning of religion. - William Edward Hartpole Lecky

Under these circumstances, there has arisen in society a figure which is certainly the most mournful, and in some respects the most awful, upon which the eye of the moralist can dwell. That unhappy being whose very name is a shame to speak; who counterfeits with a cold heart the transports of affection, and submits herself as the passive instrument of lust; who is scorned and insulted as the vilest of her sex, and doomed, for the most part, to disease and abject wretchedness and an early death, appears in every age as the perpetual symbol of the degradation and sinfulness of man. Herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue. But for her, the unchallenged purity of countless happy homes would be polluted, and not a few who, in the pride of their untempted chastity, think of her with an indignant shudder, would have known the agony of remorse and of despair. On that one degraded and ignoble form are concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with shame. She remains, while creeds and civilisations rise and fall, the eternal priestess of humanity, blasted for the sins of the people.

At one time the benevolent affections embrace merely the family, soon the circle expanding includes first a class, then a nation, then a coalition of nations, then all humanity, and finally, its influence is felt in the dealings of man with the animal world. In each of these stages a standard is formed, different from that of the preceding stage, but in each case the same tendency is recognised as virtue.

Among the intellectual phenomena of the present day, one of the most remarkable is certainly the presence among us of a small but able body of literary men, whose repugnance to modern liberal tendencies has led them to opinions on secular policy more fitted for the latitude of Russia than of England, and on religious policy more fitted for the Middle Ages than for the nineteenth century. The two things they hate the most are civil and religious liberty. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, representative government, the rights of nations to determine the form of government under which they will live, the rights of weak minorities to protection, as long as they do not injure their neighbours, the right of every man to profess the religious belief and adopt the religious worship which he considers the best, are in their phraseology mere cant or shams. The two fundamental principles of all constitutional government—that the will of the majority should rule, and that the scruples of the minority should be respected—are equally antipathetic to them. The whole tendency of modern policy in their eyes is a mistake, and history has to them a certain melancholy charm as a record of religious and political despotisms which have been weakly banished from the world.