Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ARE THERE ANY CREEDS WHICH IT IS WICKED FOR US TO QUESTION? Any body of people whatsoever has, of course, an undoubted right to organize on the basis of any belief or principles which it may happen to hold. This, always, on the supposition that those principles or beliefs are not antagonistic to human welfare. They have a right to establish the conditions of membership and limit their numbers as much as they please. For example, suppose a set of persons chanced to hold the belief that the so-called Shakspere plays were written by Bacon. They have a perfect right to organize a society, and to say that nobody shall be a member of that society unless he agrees with them in this belief. If I happen, as I do, to hold some other conviction about the matter, I have no right to blame them because they do not wish me to be a member. I can organize, if I please, another society that shall have for its cardinal doctrinal statement the belief that Shakspere was the author of these plays. There is no need that I should quarrel with people holding these other ideas. Or, if I am a laboring man,— in the technical sense of the word that is commonly used to-day,— I have a right to organize a society devoted to the furtherance of the eight- hour movement, or any other specific end or aim whichseems to me necessary to the welfare of society as organized in the modern world. All this we concede at the outset. People have a perfect right to organize on the basis of their particular beliefs, and to keep out of their organization those persons who do not happen to agree with them. But,— and here is a most important consideration,— if these beliefs seem to us who are outside to be vital; if they appear to concern us, to touch our well-being, our future hopes,— then we certainly have a ri... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.