It has been said of the Boer that he is bigoted and intolerant in religious matters. That this accusation should ever have been made has always appeared to us a matter of astonishment. It can only have been made by those who either know little or nothing of the true up-country Boer, or who confuse intolerance with the totally distinct attitude of a peculiar steadfastness to your own forms of faith. When we remember that it is not much over a century since the last execution for abstract opinion took place in Europe; when we recall the fact that within the memory of those still comparatively young, in the most enlightened community (or that which so considers itself), a man cultured, able, and public-spirited, was excluded from the performance of his legislative duties, imprisoned, and befouled by the Press and the nation on account of his view with regard to the nature of a first cause; when we mark that, in the same community, it was only the other day that Christians holding one form of shibboleth were with difficulty, and after fierce struggles, brought to admit brother Christians using another closely-allied shibboleth to any participation in public life or honours; when we consider the fact that to-day a Roman Catholic or a Jew is still in England excluded from the highest offices of State on the ground of his abstract views, and is on that ground regarded with scorn and disgust by the large mass of his fellow-countrymen; when we recall the fact that it is not twenty years since a book speculating on the abstract grounds of religion was refused at the bookstalls of the United Kingdom, and publicly destroyed in several cases; when we note the contemptible and grotesque riots which to-day occur in the heart of our most modern cities over the cut of a cassock or the burning of a pitiful pot of scent; when the gift of a work of art representing a mother and child to a board school is sufficient to rend an Anglo-Saxon community with fierce and brutal passions; when these things are considered, it is surely unintelligible that a charge of religious intolerance should be made against the South African Boer. With every excuse for an exceptional intolerance, a large portion of his ancestors having come to South Africa to escape religious persecution in Europe, he yet compares favourably with other nations in this respect, and the burnings of Quakers and witches which disgraced even New England have never been known in Africa. No man has ever suffered death for his religious views on these shores.