Whenever Great Britain's iron hand needs to appear, like a well-oiled mechanism that is never forgotten or neglected, the two pillars that hold up the Empire's dominion rise into view: the Administration and the Law. As I have said before . . . nothing odder than the flimsy wood and stone building called the Palace of Justice, in the farthest corner of the South Atlantic, provided so that the authorities might investigate the murder of men, who, romantically . . . went out to exercise their own rights over the life and liberty of others about whom they had not the slightest knowledge.

Although proselytizing is not in itself necessarily intolerant, it does close the open-ended door of pluralism

I believe that any Christian who is qualified to write a good popular book on any
science may do much more by that than by any direct apologetic work…. We can
make people often attend to the Christian point of view for half an hour or so; but
the moment they have gone away from our lecture or laid down our article, they
are plunged back into a world where the opposite position is taken for granted….
What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by
Christians on other subjects—with their Christianity latent. You can see this most
easily if you look at it the other way around. Our faith is not very likely to be
shaken by any book on Hinduism. But if whenever we read an elementary book
on Geology, Botany, Politics, or Astronomy, we found that its implications were
Hindu, that would shake us. It is not the books written in direct defense of
Materialism that make the modern man a materialist; it is the materialistic
assumptions in all the other books. In the same way, it is not books on
Christianity that will really trouble him. But he would be troubled if, whenever he
wanted a cheap popular introduction to some science, the best work on the
market was always by a Christian.

The Hindus criticise the Mahomedans for having spread their religion by the use of the sword. They also ridicule Christianity on the score of the Inquisition.

But really speaking, who is better and more worthy of our respect—the Mahomedans and Christians who attempted to thrust down the throats of unwilling persons what they regarded as necessary for their salvation, or the Hindu who would not spread the light, who would endeavour to keep others in darkness, who would not consent to share his intellectual and social inheritance with those who are ready and willing to make it a part of their own make-up?

I have no hesitation in saying that if the Mahomedan has been cruel, the Hindu has been mean; and meanness is worse than cruelty.

...we have no right to decide off-hand that it is an unnatural pleasure to eat sawdust. A man might be constituted so that he liked it. And so long as his peculiarity doesn't damage or interfere with other people, there's no reason why he shouldn't be left alone.

But if it is the man's fixed belief that sawdust eating is essential to human happiness; if he attributes almost everything that happens either to the effects of eating it or not eating it; if he imagines that most of the people he meets are also sawdust-eaters, and above all, if he thinks that the salvation of the world depends entirely upon making laws to compel people to eat sawdust, whether they like it or not, then it is fair to say that his mind is unbalanced on the subject; and that, further, the practice itself, however innocent it may appear, is in that particular case perverse. Sanity consists in the proper equilibrium of ideas in general. That is the only sense in which it is true that genius is connected with insanity.

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve. This is true even of the pious brethren who carry the gospel to foreign parts.