We have said that religious liberty increases as we go lower in the social scale. Let us consider, now, how it is affected by locality. The rule may be stated at once. Religious liberty diminishes with the number of inhabitants in a place.
However humble may be the position of the dweller in a small village at a distance from a town, he must attend the dominant church because no other will be represented in the place. He may be in heart a Dissenter, but his dissent has no opportunity of expressing itself by a different form of worship. The laws of his country may be as liberal as you please; their liberality is of no practical service in such a case as this because religious profession requires public worship, and an isolated family cannot institute a cult.
If, indeed, there were the liberty of abstinence the evil would not be so great. The liberty of rejection is a great and valuable liberty. If a particular kind of food is unsuited to my constitution, and only that kind of food is offered me, the permission to fast is the safeguard of my health and comfort. The loss of this negative liberty is terrible in convivial customs, when the victim is compelled to drink against his will.
The Dissenter in the country can be forced to conform by his employer or by public opinion, acting indirectly. The master may avoid saying, “I expect you to go to Church,” but he may say, “I expect you to attend a place of worship,” which attains precisely the same end with an appearance of greater liberality. Public opinion may be really liberal enough to tolerate many different forms of religion, but if it does not tolerate abstinence from public services the Dissenter has to conform to the dominant worship in places where there is no other. In England it may seem that there is not very much hardship in this, as the Church is not extreme in doctrine and is remarkably tolerant of variety, yet even in England a conscientious Unitarian might feel some difficulty about creeds and prayers which were never intended for him. There are, however, harder cases than those of a Dissenter forced to conform to the Church of England. The Church of Rome is far more extreme and authoritative, far more sternly repressive of human reason; yet there are thousands of rural places on the Continent where religious toleration is supposed to exist, and where, nevertheless, the inhabitants are compelled to hear mass to avoid the imputation of absolute irreligion. A man like Wesley or Bunyan would, in such a position, have to choose between apparent Romanism and apparent Atheism, if indeed the village opinion did not take good care that he should have no choice in the matter.
It may be said that people should live in places where their own form of worship is publicly practised. No doubt many do so. I remember an Englishman belonging to a Roman Catholic family who would not spend a Sunday in an out-of-the-way place in Scotland because he could not hear mass. Such a person, having the means to choose his place of residence, and a faith so strong that religious considerations always came first with him, would compel everything to give way to the necessity for having mass every Sunday, but this is a very exceptional case. Ordinary people are the victims of circumstances and not their masters.
If a villager has little religious freedom he does not greatly enlarge it when he becomes a soldier. He has the choice between the Church of England and the Church of Rome. In some countries even this very moderate degree of liberty is denied. Within the present century Roman Catholic soldiers were compelled to attend Protestant services in Prussia. The truth is that the genuine military spirit is strongly opposed to individual opinion in matters of religion. Its ideal is that every detail in a soldier’s existence should be settled by the military authorities, his religious belief amongst the rest.
What may be truly said about military authority in religious matters is that as the force employed is perfectly well known,—as it is perfectly well known that soldiers take part in religious services under compulsion,—there is no hypocrisy in their case, especially where the conscription exists, and therefore but slight moral hardship. Certainly the greatest hardship of all is to be compelled to perform acts of conformity with all the appearance of free choice. The tradesman who must go to mass to have customers is in a harder position than the soldier. For this reason, it is better for the moral health of a nation, when there is to be compulsion of some kind, that it should be boldly and openly tyrannical; that its work should be done in the face of day; that it should be outspoken, uncompromising, complete. To tyranny of that kind a man may give way without any loss of self-respect, he yields to force majeure; but to that viler and meaner kind of tyranny which keeps a man in constant alarm about the means of earning his living, about the maintenance of some wretched little peddling position in society, he yields with a sense of far deeper humiliation, with a feeling of contempt for the social power that uses such miserable means, and of contempt for himself also.