Note RETURN — FOOTNOTES.

The second excess into which Christianity, under the action of frail human nature, easily ran was intolerance. This intolerance, as in the previous case, is only a virtue run to seed; for, as all asceticism is merely a misapplication or an exaggeration of the virtue of self-denial and self-control, so all intolerance, or defect of kindly regard to the contrary in opinion or conduct, is merely a crude or an impolitic extension of the imperative ought which lies at the root of all moral truth, and specially of all monotheistic religions. There is, indeed, a certain intolerance in truth which will not allow it to hold parley with error; and every new religion with a lofty inspiration, conscious of a divine mission, is necessarily aggressive: it delights to pluck the beard of ancestral authority, and marches right into the presence of hoary absurdity and consecrated stupidity. No doubt there is a boundary here which the divine wisdom of the Son of God pointed at emphatically enough when he was asked to bring down fire from heaven on those who taught or did otherwise; but the evil spirit of self-importance which prompted this request was too deeply engrained in human nature to be eradicated by a single warning of the great teacher. This spirit of arrogant individualism asserted itself at an early period in the disorderly Corinthian Church very much in the same way as it does amongst ourselves, specially in Scotland, at the present moment—viz. by the multiplication of sects, the exaggeration of petty distinctions, and the fomenting of petty rivalries,—“Now this I say, that every one of you saith, I am of Paul; and I of Apollos; and I of Cephas; and I of Christ” (I Cor. i. 12),—a spirit which the apostle most strongly denounces as proceeding manifestly from the overrated importance of some secondary specialty, or some accessory condition, of the body of believers, who thus clubbed themselves into a denomination, and resulting in an unkindly divergence from the common highway of evangelic life, and an intolerant desire to override one Christian brother with the private shibboleth of another, and to stamp him with the seal of their own conceit. The field in which this intolerant Spirit displayed itself was of course different, according to the influences at work at the time; but there is one field which, if church history is to teach us anything, we are bound to emphasise strongly, that is the field of dogma; for, if there be any influence that has worked more powerfully to discredit Christianity than even the immoral lives and selfish maxims of professing Christians, it is the fixation and glorification and idol-worship of the dogma. No doubt Christianity is far from being that system, or rather no system, of vague and cloudy sentiment to which some persons would reduce it: it has bones, and a firm framework; it stands upon facts, and is not without doctrines, but it does not make a parade of doctrines; and the faith which it enjoins, as is manifest from the definition and historical examples in Hebrews xi., is not an intellectual faith in the doctrines of a metaphysical theology, but a living faith in the moral government of the world and a heroic conduct in life, as the necessary expression of such faith. The mere intellectual orthodoxy on which the Christian Church has, by the tradition of centuries, placed such a high value, is, in the apostolical estimate, plainly worth nothing; for the devils also believe and tremble, as St. James has it, or as our Lord himself said in the striking summation to the Sermon on the Mount, “Not they who call me Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom, but they who do the will of my Father who is in heaven. By their works, not by their creed, ye shall know them.”19 Nevertheless, the exaltation of the dogma has always been a favourite tendency of the Church, and the besetting sin of the clergy. With the mass of the people, to swear to a curious creed is always more easy than to lead a noble life; while to the clerical intellect it must always give a secret satisfaction to think that the science of theology, which is the furthest removed from the handling of the great mass of men, has in their hands assumed a well-defined shape, of which the articulations are as subtle and as necessary as the steps of solution in a difficult algebraic problem. The late Baron Bunsen, for many years Prussian ambassador in London, one of the most large-minded and large-hearted of Christian men, in the preface to his great Bibel werk, devotes a special chapter to Dogmatism as a vice of the clerical mind leading to false views of Scripture; over and above what he calls the modern revival of scholastic theology in Germany, he enumerates four dominant epochs of ecclesiastical life in which this anti-evangelical tendency has prominently asserted itself. These are—(1) the dogmatism of the great Church councils in the reigns of Constantine, Theodosius, and Justinian; (2) the medieval scholasticism of the Western Church; (3) the Protestant scholasticism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; (4) the dogmatism of the Jesuits, Perron, Bossuet, and others. Had this dogmatic tendency of the Church contented itself with tabulating a curious scheme of divine mysteries, though it might justly have been deemed impertinent, and here and there a little presumptuous, yet it might have been condoned lightly as a sort of clerical recreation in hours which might have been worse employed; but it could not be content with this: it passed at once into action, and in this guise prevailed to deface the fair front of the Church with gashes of more bloody and barbarous inhumanity than ever marked the altars of the Baals and Molochs of the most savage heathen superstitions.