Why does a man fall in love? No one knows. And if he fall in love, can you cure him of it by argument? Would it be any use to say to him? "The girl you love is not beautiful, is not clever; she would be of no use to you, she does not return your love at all. You cannot really love her." He would only laugh and say, "All that may be true, and yet the fact remains unaltered. She is the woman I love. My reason may prevent my marrying her, it cannot prevent my love. And you may be right that this other woman has all the virtues, but I have no love for her." So it is with all the emotions. You either have them or have not. You do not reason about them. Reason is of things we doubt, not of things we know. Therefore are the beliefs of one religion incomprehensible to the believers in another. Nothing is so difficult to understand as an emotion you have not felt. What is perfect beauty to one man is stark ugliness to another. So it is with religion. To understand well the faith you must have in you all the chords that these faiths draw music from, and how many have that?
Religion is of the heart, not of the reason. Theologians of all creeds warn the believer against reason as a snare of the devil. A freethinker must be an Atheist. History is one long conflict between religion and science. But why is this, if they have no concern one with another? Why fight, why not exist together?
Because all men, freethinkers as well as theologians, have failed to see what religion really consists in. They think it is in the theories of creation, of God, of salvation, of heaven and hell. They look one and all to the creeds and dogmas as religion.
And none of these creeds and dogmas will, as a whole, stand criticism. They fall before the thinker into irretrievable ruin, and therefore the freethinker imagines he has destroyed religion. But religion lives on, and he wonders why. He puts it down to the blindness of men. The theologian rejoices because the continued life of religion seems to him the vindication of the creeds. Yet are they both wrong. Men are not fools, nor does religion live by the truth of its creeds. The whole initial idea has been mistaken. The creeds are but theories to explain religion. Scientific men have invented the ether and theories connected with it to explain heat and light and electricity. These theories are good now, and are universally accepted, but they are not proved. Supposing a hundred years hence wider perception and new facts should throw great doubts on whether ether exists at all as supposed, or on the present theories of heat and electricity? Suppose, too, that the old school scientists are stubborn and refuse to meet these new thoughts? What will the sensible man do? Will he say, "This theory of ether waves is untenable, exploded, foolish, and therefore I will believe it no longer; and as the theory is wrong, so too the phenomena of the theory are all imaginations. There are no such things as heat and light, and I will not warm myself in the sun." Would that be sense? I think reason would reply, "I am sorry the old theories are gone. They were true while they lasted. But now they are dead, and we have not found new ones. Yet if the theory be dead, the facts are still there. The sun still shines, and we have heat and light. These things are true. No man shall frighten me and say, 'If you will not believe our science you shall not warm yourself at our sun. You shall not light your fire or your lamp unless you admit ether waves.' Perhaps a new theory may arise. But anyhow I have the sun yet, and my lamp is not broken. They are facts still."