“Scaffolds, dungeons, jails flourish only in the shadow of a faith — of that need to believe which has infested the mind forever. The devil pales beside the man who owns a truth, his truth. We are unfair to a Nero, a Tiberius: it was not they who invented the concept heretic: they were only degenerate dreamers who happened to be entertained by massacres. The real criminals are men who establish an orthodoxy on the religious or political level, men who distinguish between the faithful and the schismatic.”

"Our Contemporary Christ," in Borderland Theology and Other Essays (1968), p. 82

Source: Les Misérables

[2007, Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, World Wisdom, 80, 978-1-933316-42-0]
Spiritual path, Esoterism

Source: The Friends of Voltaire (1906), Ch. 1 : D'Alembert: The Thinker, p.28

Sermon (1899)

Preface (Scribner edition, 1872) <!-- New York, Scribner p xx -->
Chips from a German Workshop (1866)
Context: He must be a man of little faith, who would fear to subject his own religion to the same critical tests to which the historian subjects all other religions. We need not surely crave a tender or merciful treatment for that faith which we hold to be the only true one. We should rather challenge it for the severest tests and trials, as the sailor would for the good ship to which he trusts his own life, and the lives of those who are dear to him. In the Science of Religion, we can decline no comparisons, nor claim any immunities for Christianity, as little as the missionary can, when wrestling with the subtle Brahmin, or the fanatical Mussulman, or the plain speaking Zulu.

Source: Man for Himself (1947), Ch. 4

"The Protestant Mystics", p. 52
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)

St. 8
The Present Crisis (1844)
Context: Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but record
One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word;
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,—
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.