'
He took up the poker and stirred the fire.
'That will do, Dennis,' said Marshall, who was evidently fidgety.
'The room is rather warm. There's nothing in Vincent which irritates
me more than those bits of poetry with which he winds up.
"God made the man--man made the slave,"
and all that stuff. If God made the man, God made the slave. I know
what Vincent's little game is, and it is the same game with all his
set. They want to keep Chartism religious, but we shall see. Let us
once get the six points, and the Established Church will go, and we
shall have secular education, and in a generation there will not be
one superstition left.'
'Theological superstition, you mean?' said Clara.
'Yes, of course, what others are there worth notice?'
'A few. The superstition of the ordinary newspaper reader is just as
profound, and the tyranny of the majority may be just as injurious as
the superstition of a Spanish peasant, or the tyranny of the
Inquisition.'
'Newspapers will not burn people as the priests did and would do
again if they had the power, and they do not insult us with fables
and a hell and a heaven.'
'I maintain,' said Clara with emphasis, 'that if a man declines to
examine, and takes for granted what a party leader or a newspaper
tells him, he has no case against the man who declines to examine, or
takes for granted what the priest tells him.
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