Heresy: Its Utility And Morality

ed as though he were some horrid monster to be feared and hated? Most religionists, instead of endeavouring with kindly thought to provide some solution for the difficulties propounded by their hereti

d saints of a period less than twenty generations later. Lord Bacon, in his own age, was charged with Atheism, Sir Isaac Newton with Socinianism, the famous Tillotson was actually charged with Atheism, and Dr. Burnet wrote against the commonly received traditions of the fall and deluge. There are but few men of the past of whom the church boasts to-day, who have not at some time been pointed at as heretics by orthodox antagonists excited by party rancour. Heresy is in itself neither Atheism nor Theism, neither t

e are more good and true men in nations where civilisation has made progress, and amongst faiths which have been modified by high humanising influences. Men are good not because of their orthodoxy, but in spite of it; their goodness is the outgrowth of their humanity, not of their orthodoxy. Heresy is necessary to progress;

s the intellect, orthodoxy smothers it. Heresy is the star twinkle in the night, orthodoxy the cloud which hides this faint gleam of light from the weary travellers on life's encumbered pathway. Orthodoxy is well exemplified in the dark middle ages, when the mass of men and women believed much and knew little, when miracles were common and schools were rare, and whe

heresy has been generally used as a means of exciting bad feeling. The Greek word [---] which is in fact our word heresy, signifies simply, selection or choice. The he etiq philosopher was th

, but it is more often used of those who are unfaithful, and then it is generally a libel. Mahomedans and Christians both call Jews infidels, and Mahomedans and Christians call each other infidels. Each religionist is thus an infidel to all sects but his

curse and perdition of Adam's sin; or even by the Rev. Charles Voysey, who declines to preach "the God of the Bible," and who will not teach that every word of the Old and New Testament is the word of God; or by the Rev. Dunbar Heath, who in defiance of the Bible doctrine, that man has only existed on the earth about 6,000 years, teaches that unnumbered chiliads have passed away since the human family commenced to play at nations on our earth; or by Bishop Colenso, who in his impeachment of the Pentateuch, his denial of the literal truth of the narratives of the creation, fall, and deluge, actually impugns the whole scheme of Christianity (if the foundation be false, the superstructure cannot be true); or by the Rev. Baden Powell, who declared "that the whole tenor of geology is in entire contradiction to the cosmogony delivered from Mount Sinai," and who denied a "local heaven above and a local hell beneath the earth;" or by the Rev.

inor importance, now in some bold declaration at variance with major and more essential tenets. Even Bishop Watson's so famous for his Bible Apology, declared that the church articles and creeds were not binding on any man. "They may be true, they may be false," he wrote. Today scores of Church of England clergymen openly protest against, or groa

ir meetings, or by their printed publications, it is clear that not only out of doors, but even amongst their own circle it is felt that their researches conflict seriously with the Hebrew writ. The Society has been preached against and prayed against,

lants of the Hebrew Chronology, which, limits man's existence to the short space of 6,000 years; they have been deniers(sp.) of the origin of

ivable in its grandeur. Geology, to quote the words of Dr. Kalisch, declares "the utter impossibility of a creation of even the earth alone in six days." Mr. Goodwin says in the "Essays and Reviews:" "The school-books of the present day, while they teach the child that the earth moves, yet assure him that it is a little less than six thou

h popular and long established belief. The Ptolemaic system of astronomy, which had then full possession of the minds of men, contemplated the whole visible universe from the earth as the immovable centre of things. Copernicus changed the point of view, and placing the beholder in the sun, at once reduced the earth to an inconspicuous globule, a merely subordinate member of a family of planets; which the terrestrials had, until then, fondly imagined to be but pendants and ornaments of their own habitation. The Church, naturally, took a lively interest in the disputes which arose between the philosophers ot the new school, and those who adhered to the old doctrines, inasmuch as the Hebrew records, the basis of rel

sharply catechised as to when he had last been inside the Unitarian Chapel, and only saved his seat by not too boldly avowing his opinions. Lord Amberley, who was "unwise" enough to be honest in some of his answers, did not obtain his seat for South Devon in consequence of the suspicion of heresy excited against him. It is chiefly to the odium theologicum that Mr. Mill may attribute his rejection at Westminster; and it is suppos

in passages which both the Church and the Synagogue consider as nothing else than a plain statement of fact. A writer who had sufficient boldness to encounter such obstacles, and to make an appeal to the public, would only expose himself to the invectives of offended bigotry, and to the misrepresentations of interested malice. The press would be made to ring with declamations against him, and neither learning, nor argument, nor reason, nor moderation on his side, would protect him from the literary assassination which awaited him. In vain would he put on the heaven-tempered panoply of truth. The weapons which could neither pierce his buckler nor break his casque, might be made to pass with envenomed points through the joints of his armour. Every trivial error which he might commit, would be magnified into a flagrant fault; and every insignificant mistake into which he might fall, would be represented by the bigotted, or by the hireling critics of the day as an ignorant, or as a perverse deviation from the

gh the feelings of my wife and children, whom he most vilely and basely slandered. The first is yet unpunished, the second escaped condign punishment only by writing himself down libeller, and praying pardon for the slanderous coinage of his brain. And yet this latter Church of England clergyman, w