FROM-THE-LIBRARY-OF
TRINITYCOLLEGETORDNTO
TRINITY UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY,
TOLERANCE
<ZD.no lectures
ADDRESSED TO THE STUDENTS OF SEVERAL OF THE
DIVINITY SCHOOLS OF THE PROTESTANT
EPISCOPAL CHURCH
BY
PHILLIPS BROOKS
RECTOR OF TRINITY CHURCH, BOSTON
NEW YORK
E. P. BUTTON AND COMPANY
31 WEST TWENTY THIRD STREET
1887
Copyright, 1887,
BY E. P. DUTTON & Co.
JOHN WILSON AND SON, CA
BRIDGE.
FIRST LECTURE.
GENTLEMEN :
I HAVE accepted with grateful pleasure
the privilege of meeting you upon two
evenings and talking to you upon Tol
erance. I chose that subject because I
had long vaguely thought of lecturing
upon it, and also because it seemed to me
as if there were no group of men to whom
one could so fitly speak upon it as a gath
ering of students of theology. To them
more than to other men must come the
puzzling problems and interesting sugges
tions which the whole subject of tolerance
involves.
I want to speak this evening about the
nature and the history and the hope of
tolerance. In my other lecture I should
6 Tolerance.
like to see the applications of what I shall
have said to-day to some of the special
conditions of our time and of our Church.
So we can come nearest to covering the
ground.
I call my subject Tolerance, not Tol
eration. Tolerance is a disposition: Tol
eration is the behavior in which that
disposition finds expression. A disposi
tion is to its appropriate behavior as a
man is to his shadow. The shadow repre
sents the man, but it often misrepresents
him. It is larger than he is, or smaller. It
runs before him, or it lags behind him,
according as he stands related to the light
which casts it We sometimes have to
guess at what the man is by his shadow;
and so we are constantly having to guess
at men s dispositions by their behavior.
But we never can let ourselves forget that
the disposition is the living thing; and so
to it our thought and study must be
given. Therefore I speak of tolerance,
and not of toleration.
First Lecture. 7
In studying first, then, the nature of tol
erance, that much-belauded and much-
misrepresented grace of our own time, we
want to start with this assertion, which
is, indeed, the key-assertion of all I have to
say, that it is composed of two elements,
both of which are necessary to its true
existence, and on the harmonious and pro
portionate blending of which the quality
of the tolerance which is the result de
pends. These elements are, first, positive -
conviction; and second, sympathy with
men whose convictions differ from our
own. Does it sound strange to claim that
both these elements are necessary to make
a true tolerance? Have we been in the
habit of thinking that strong, positive con
viction was almost incompatible with toler
ance? Have we perhaps been almost
afraid to yield to the temptation to let
ourselves go into the tolerant disposition
of our time, because it seemed to us as if
there were no place there for that sure and
strong belief which we knew was the first
8 Tolerance.
necessity of a strong human life? It
would not be strange if we had all felt
such a fear. It would be strange if any of
us had entirely escaped it, so studiously,
so constantly, so earnestly has the world
been assured that positive faith and toler
ance have no fellowship with one another.
" The only foundation for tolerance," said
Charles James Fox, " is a degree of scep
ticism." Not many months ago a most
respected clergyman of my own town,
speaking at the dedication of a statue of
John Harvard in the university which
bears his name, declared of the Puritans
by whom that college was created : " They
were intolerant, as all men, the world over,
in all time, have always been, and will
always be, when they are in solemn earn
est for truth or error." I think that those
are melancholy words. The historical fact
is melancholy enough. That fact we must
grant as mainly true, though not without
fair and notable exceptions; but to fore
tell that man will never come to the condi-
First Lecture. 9
tion in which he can be earnest and tolerant
at once, that is beyond all things melan
choly; that spreads a darkness over all
the future, and obliterates man s brightest
hope. That condemns mankind to an end
less choice between earnest bigotry and
tolerant indifference, or, rather, to an
endless swinging back and forth between
the two in hopeless discontent, in everlast
ing despair of rest. Against all such
statements of despair we want to take the
strongest ground. We want to assert most
positively that so far from earnest per
sonal conviction and generous tolerance
being incompatible with one another, the
two are necessary each to each. " It is
the natural feeling of all of us/ said Fred
erick Maurice in one of those utterances
of his which at first sound like paradoxes,
and by and by seem to be axioms, " it is
the natural feeling of all of us that charity
is founded upon the uncertainty of truth.
I believe it is founded on the certainty of
truth."
io Tolerance.
One token that this is true is that only
with both these elements present in it does
tolerance become a clear, definable, re
spectable position for a man to stand in,
an honorable quality for a character to
possess. Dr. Holmes, in his Life of Mr.
Emerson, declares that "the word toler
ance* is an insult as applied by one set
of well-behaved people to another." No
doubt there are insulting tones enough in
which the word may be used; but the
word itself is not insulting. It expresses a
perfectly legitimate and honorable relation
between two minds and natures which
there is no other word to express. Here
is my friend with whom I entirely agree ;
his thoughts and convictions are the same
as mine. I do not tolerate him ; there is
no place for toleration there. Here is my
other friend, who disagrees with me entirely.
I disagree with him. But I respect him ; I
want him to be true to his convictions ; and
while I claim the right and duty of arguing
with him and trying to show him that I am
First Lecture. 1 1
right, and he is wrong, I would not silence
him by violence if I could. I would not
for the world have him say that he thinks
I am right before his reason is convinced.
Now, that is tolerance. Is there any insult
there? Is not that a recognizable, manly
position for me to stand in as regards my
friend? Is either his manhood or mine
injured or despised? But is it not clear
also that the healthiness of this tolerance
which is in me toward him depends on its
integrity? It is because both its elements
are there that it is a sound condition,
worthy of his soul and mine. Take either
away, and the element which is left becomes
insulting. But then it is not tolerance which
is insulting; for this is not tolerance; for
tolerance is the meeting in perfect har
mony of earnest conviction and personal
indulgence.
Whoever has thoughtfully observed hu
man life, knows very well that any quality,
which for its fullest perfectness involves
two elements, will almost certainly present
12 Tolerance.
strange and perplexing complications be
fore it comes to its complete condition.
Strange indeed is the method of the
moral progress of mankind. Not as the
ship sails, moving through the water
evenly, all together, every part keeping
pace with every other part ; rather as the
man walks, bringing forward first one side
and then the other, one side being at any
given moment in advance of the other,
equilibrium being always lost and regained
again a little farther on, to be re-lost again
immediately : so, as the man walks, does the
moral progress of mankind advance. Thus
it is that conviction of truth and allowance
of dissent are never in perfect balance and
proportion to each other; now one and
now the other of them is always in advance,
as the whole man in this uneven, sidelong
fashion moves unsteadily forward toward
the time when he shall be tolerant of his
fellow-men just in proportion to the earn
estness with which he holds his own well-
proven truth.
First Lecture. 13
This leads to certain complications which
it will be well to notice, because they very
often, as I think, confuse our thought on
the whole subject, and seem to leave us all
adrift. Here are two men who stand and
look out together over the whole world of
opinion. They are not a part of it, for
neither of them has any real opinions of
his own. They are like men who stand
together on a seashore rock and look out
over the ocean. It is nothing to them
which way the waves are running, and
how they cross and recross each other in
tumultuous confusion. It is nothing to
these men how other men are thinking.
They are entirely indulgent. They call
themselves, and the world calls them, tol
erant. And now suppose that one of those
men gets a conviction : he becomes thor
oughly in earnest for something which he
believes is true. What is the immediate
result? Almost certainly there comes a
chill and a reserve in his indulgence. Now
it appears to him to be a dreadful thing
14 Tolerance.
that other men should think so wrongly.
All the indifference is gone, and the man
is almost more than man, almost divinely
true and sound, if he is not betrayed by
his earnestness into some sort of bigotry,
some intolerant wish toward these men
who are in error. He lifts the axe, or
lights the fire of persecution. Meanwhile
there stands his brother where he used to
stand, still smiling his universal smile, and
saying benignly to all the creeds and here
sies and opinions, " God bless you every
one," because he has no real creed or
opinions, or even a genuine hearty heresy
of his own. And now which of these two
men shall we praise? Beyond all doubt
the man of earnestness, the man of positive
faith. But then he is a bigot ! Will you
praise Torquemada, standing in triumph
beside his burning victims in the market
place in Seville, more than Montaigne, a
century later, sitting in his library at Paris
and patronizing all the faiths of which he
believed not one, all of which in his soul
First Lecture. 1 5
he despised? If Torquemada ever had
been like Montaigne, and had come to be
a persecutor out of pure conviction, then
horrible as is this which he is doing, awful
as is the lurid flame which lights his virtue,
I must count that he has made true pro
gress ; for these two good things are in him,
first, a firm belief in something as the
truth of God; and next, a passionate de
sire that the truth of God should reign
upon the earth.
But what then? We know that this is
not final. This praise of the bigot is not
praise of bigotry. We are thankful for
the traveller that he has left the City of
Destruction and that he is on the way to
the New Jerusalem ; but none the less we
feel the misery of the Slough of Despond
through which he is struggling on the way.
Our Inquisitor has made a real advance
from the easy tolerance in which he used
to live ; but it has been as if, having started
on his journey, he went back to get one
part of his equipment without which his
1 6 Tolerance.
journey could not successfully be made.
The man who thus goes on shore again to
get his sails, creeps out of the harbor be
hind the other sailless boat, which is only
drifting on the tide; but nevertheless he
is nearer to the ultimate haven which they
both are seeking, for the boat that has no
sails will never come there at all. So, to
state it quite without a figure, there are
times when the intolerant man, in virtue,
not of his intolerance, but of that which
for the time has caused him to be intole
rant, is farther on toward the ultimate
tolerance than his indulgent brother who
stands in horror at his bigotry. Such is
the curious complication which often marks
men s development on the world s pro
gress in any good attainment. There
comes a seeming loss of that which is all
the time being gained. It is like the cir
cles on an eddying stream. There is one
point in the circle which the eddy makes,
one drop of the stream s water, which is
distinctly going backward, going up the
first Lecture. ij
stream. It seems to be going away from
the ocean and back toward the fountain.
It is not so far toward the ocean as another
drop which is hurrying by it with its eager
face set toward the sea ; and yet the back
ward-plunging drop will reach the ocean
first. The drop which now is hurrying
seaward will have the same weary circuit
to make before it can really find the sea it
seeks. It is a blessed thing to know that
both of them, in all their eddyings and
wanderings, are borne upon the bosom of
a stream greater than either of them, which
never ceases to press onward to the ocean
which is the final home of all.
There is no law which it is more neces
sary for one who studies human life and
character to understand, than this law to
which I have just alluded. The " law of the
three conditions " we may call it. The law
of life, death, and the higher life would
be its fuller name. Jesus said, " Except a
man be born again, he cannot see the
kingdom of God." " Whosoever loseth his
1 8 Tolerance.
life for My sake," he said, " the same shall
save it." See what some of the illustra
tions are. The crude hopefulness of boy
hood passes through the disappointments
which it is sure to meet, and comes out,
if it keeps its health, into the robust and
sanguine faith of middle age. A merely
traditional religion goes into doubt, and
gathers there strength of personal convic
tion, and comes forth the reasonable religion
of a full-grown man. Innocence perishes
in temptation, to be born again out of the
fires as virtue. Life, death, and resurrec
tion is the law of life; and bigotry and
tolerance can never be deeply understood
unless we know how easy indulgence often
has to die in narrow positive conviction
before it can be born again as the gener
ous tolerance of the thoroughly believing
man.
The truth that qualities have their quali
ties, is one which we need always to re
member. You have not told the whole
story when you have said that a man is
First Lecture. 79
kind, or brave, or truthful, any more than
you have given a complete account when
you have said of the sunset or of the bird s
wing that it is red, when you have said
of the sky or of the violet that it is blue.
As there are colors of colors, so there are
qualities of qualities. " How is he truth
ful, or brave, or kind?" That question
still remains for you to ask. And in large
part this quality of a quality will be indi
cated by the motive which at any par
ticular moment calls the quality forth
into action. The qualities of qualities are
largely denoted by the colors of their mo
tives shining through. This is quite true of
tolerance. Let me enumerate very briefly
some of the qualities of that quality, and
see how each one is colored by the hue of
its motive. I think that in various kinds
of tolerance we can see six colors dis
tinctly shining through. First, there is the
lowest of all, that of which I have already
spoken, the tolerance of pure indifference,
the mere result of aimless good-nature. If
2o Tolerance.
I do not care, or do not think it possible to
know, whether there is a God or not, why
should I not be perfectly willing that this
man should say that there is, and this
other man should say that there is not? ,
Secondly, there is the tolerance of policy,
the allowing of error because it would do
more harm than good to try to root it out,
the voluntary disuse of a right to eradicate
it, the leaving of the tares for the wheat s
sake. This is the tolerance of which Burke
speaks when he says that " Toleration is
a part of moral and political prudence."
Thirdly, there is the tolerance of helpless- v
ness. This is the acquiescence in the ut
terance of error because we cannot help
ourselves. It is the tolerance of persecuted
minorities. It was the tolerance of Jeremy
Taylor, writing the " Liberty of Prophesy
ing " while the Parliament were masters in
the land. Fourthly, there is the tolerance ,/
of pure respect for man. In entire dis
agreement with a man s opinion, you are
able still cordially to recognize his right
First Lecture. 21
to his own thought, simply because he is
a man, whether his thought will do harm
or good. Fifthly, there is the tolerance of ^
spiritual sympathy. The man s opinions
are all wrong ; but he means well, and you
have grown to feel the value of your spirit
ual oneness. And sixthly, there is the*
tolerance of the enlarged view of truth,
combined with a cordial and entire faith
in God. This is the tolerance for which
Milton has pleaded in his application of
the myth of Typhon and Osiris, the tole
rance which grows up in any man who is
aware that truth is larger than his concep
tion of it, and that what seem to be other
men s errors must often be other parts of
the truth of which he has only a portion,
and that truth is God s child, and the
fortunes of truth are God s care as well
as his.
These are the six, indifference, policy, /
helplessness, human respect, spiritual sym
pathy, the vastness of God s truth. These
are the different colors which may shine
22 Tolerance.
through men s tolerances and show what
is the quality of this quality in each of
them. You see where the group divides,
in the middle. The first three kinds of v
tolerance have something base about them ;
the last three are all noble. Just where
that cleavage and division runs, the death
of tolerance of which I spoke a while ago,
is very likely to come in. Just there, a
man entering into the power of some
strong conviction is liable to become in
tolerant ; and his intolerance, coming there
and thus, is full of hope for the better tol
erance which lies in its three degrees be
yond. The man is at sea only because he
has set sail from the solid shore which is
malarious and barren, to reach by and by
the far more solid land which is bright and
\/ healthy and fruitful. Do you not see how
necessary it is to know the kind of a man s
tolerance, to see what is the quality of this
quality in every tolerant man?
If we try to get still deeper at the roots
of the impression which prevails so widely,
First Lecture. 23
that positive convictions are unnecessary
to, and even incompatible with, the toler
ance of opinions which are different from
our own, I think that we shall find that
it results from the low and meagre idea
which so many people, even of those who
talk the most about the sacredness of their
convictions, have with regard to what a /
real conviction is. A true conviction,*
anything thoroughly believed, is personal.
It becomes part of the believer s character
as well as a possession of his brain; it
makes him another and a deeper man.
And every deepening of a human nature
centralizes it, so to speak; carries it in,
that is, to the centre of the sphere upon
whose surface are described all the spe
cific faiths of men. At the centre of that
sphere sits the Spirit of Truth, of which
all these specific faiths of men are the
more or less imperfect and distorted utter
ances. The man who comes into that
central place sits there with the Spirit of
Truth and feels her power going out to the
24 Tolerance.
faiths she feeds on every side. It is in
virtue of that centralness which he has
reached that he is able to understand and
sympathize with the whole. Deepen the
Desert of Sahara to the centre of the earth,
and it will know how the Himalayas came
to be so rocky and so high. And so the
advice to give to every bigot whom you
want to make a tolerant man must be, not,
" Hold your faith more lightly, and make
less of it;" but, " Hold your faith more
profoundly, and make more of it. Get
down to its first spiritual meaning ; grasp
its fundamental truth. So you will be glad
that your brother starts from that same
centre, though he strikes the circumfer
ence at quite another .point from yours."
It is true, strange as it sounds at first, that \/
the more deeply and spiritually a man
believes in fixed endless punishment of
wicked men, the more, and not the less,
tolerant he will become of his brother who
cherishes the eternal hope.
Perhaps it is stating the same truth in a
First Lecture. 25
little different way when we say that true\x*
tolerance consists in the love of truth and
the love of man, each brought to its per
fection and living in perfect harmony with
one another ; but that these two great affec
tions are perfect and in perfect harmony
only when they are orbed and enfolded
in the yet greater affection of the love
of God. The love >of truth alone grows
cruel. It has no pity for man. It cries
out, " What matter is a human life tortured
or killed for Truth, crushed under the
chariot-wheels with which she travels to
her kingdom?" The stake-fires and the
scaffolds belong to it. And the love of
man alone grows weak. It trims and
moulds and travesties the truth to suit
men s whims. "Do you want truth to be
this? Then this it shall be," it cries to
the faithless or the lazy soul. The boy of
whom the stranger asked the way to Farm-
ington is the very image of the love of
man that is not mingled and harmonized
with love for truth. " It is eight miles/
26 Tolerance.
the boy replied. " Are you sure that it is
so far as that? " the weary traveller asked.
The boy, with his big heart overrunning
with the milk of human kindness, looked at
him and replied, "Well, seeing you are
pretty tired, I will call it seven miles."
How much of would-be tolerance has
sounded in our ears like that! The love 1
of truth alone is cruel ; the love of man ^
alone is weak and sentimental. It is only
when truth and man are loved within the
love of God, loved for His sake, truth
loved as His utterance, man loved as His
child, only then is it that they meet and
blend in tolerance. Therefore it is that y
absolute and steadfast tolerance, so far
from being the enemy of religion, as men
have foolishly said, can only come relig
iously, can never be complete till man
completely loves his God.
May I not turn, as I speak, and ask the
personal experience of the thoughtful stu
dents who hear me to bear witness to the
truth of what I have said? Has it not
First Lecture. 27
been true with you, that the more sure you
have been, the more tolerant you have
been always ? Why is it that we are often
so much more ready to tolerate those who
differ from us by the entire heaven, than
those whose different light twinkles close
by our side in the same constellation? We
have full tolerance for the Buddhist and the
Mohammedan ; less for the Quaker and the
Congregationalist ; least of all for the man
of our own Church, but of another " school
of thought" from ours. "The conforming
to ceremony hath been more exacted than
the conforming to Christianity," declared
Lord Falkland of the Government of his
day in a speech in the Parliament of 1640.
Does it not all mean that where the dif-
ference is greatest, we are most sure of our
ground, and so most tolerant? Where the
difference is least, we have most misgivings,
and there tolerance is weak. Does it not
all witness to the truth of our doctrine
that the best tolerance demands assured
and settled faith?
28 Tolerance.
Perhaps it is not desirable, certainly il
is not possible, in the short space which I
can give to that portion of my subject, to
undertake anything like a detailed history
of the growth of the spirit of tolerance
among mankind. I only say in passing
that there are few subjects so interesting
and important which have been so inade
quately treated. There is no worthy book
upon the subject. To write one might
well be the satisfaction and honor of any
man s life. All that I undertake to do in
this direction now is just to indicate some
points in the history of tolerance which
seem to illustrate the principles of toler
ance which I have been trying to describe,
confining myself entirely to that part of
the history of tolerance which lies within
the region of the Christian Faith.
The Jews were intolerant deliberately
and on purpose. It was the other side
of human progress which was being moved
forward in their history. They were ap
pointed to learn and manifest the power
First Lecture. 29
of positive belief. Their history is like the
hard, tight stalk of a plant which is built
compactly and exclusively, just in order
that it may minister to a great radiant,
generous flower which is to bloom upon
its summit. That flower came in Christ;
and there in Him was set clearly and per
fectly before the world the pattern of the
consummate tolerance. The love of truth-
and the love of man, each complete and
each in perfect harmony with the other,
within the embracing love of God, is not
that the life of Jesus? Not for a moment
does one doubt His absolute hold on
truth; it is so deep that He not merely
holds the truth, He is the truth. And
yet His patient, willing indulgence of His
brethren, His utter refusal to use any power
except reason and spiritual persuasion to
turn them from their error, all this is
just as clear as His belief; and in Him
there can be no doubt that the two essen
tially belong together.
With this high, clear note struck, with
jo Tolerance.
this image and pattern burning before her
for her guidance, the Church started on
the long, slow struggle to attain the same
high tolerance, to match the pattern of
her Master with her obedient life. In the
^ Apostolic Church and that which imme
diately followed it, the spirit of tolerance
was kept in a remarkable degree. Here
and there, no doubt, we see the signs of
a crowding forward on the side of intol
erant positive belief ; but the spirit of
brotherly kindness was so strong that al
most immediately the other side, the side
of tolerant indulgence, was brought up to
v meet it. And then, in those earliest days,
the Church was persecuted ; and persecu
tion always makes the persecuted man or
church a champion of tolerance.
^ With the cessation of persecution, with
the establishment of Christianity under
Constantine, came, in the midst of many
other evils, the enthronement and domin-
" ion of intolerance. The persecution of
Jews, of pagans, and of heretics, thence-
First Lecture. 31
forth became accepted. The love of truth,
as men interpreted it, had cast away the
love of man, and the reason lay in the
abandonment or the corruption of the
love of God.
Like so many other practices and dis
positions of mankind, Saint Augustine took
the disposition of intolerance and backed
it with theory and established it into a
principle. Indeed, the life of Augustine
illustrates within itself much of what we
have said upon our subject. As he be
came more earnest, he became less toler
ant. These are his words in his earlier
days : " Be not offended at seeing among
yourselves sinners, and even heretics.
What know you of their future state?
Nay, more, what know you of their pres
ent state in the mind of God?" And
these are his words much later in his
fervid and eager life : " I abandoned my
first opinion, overcome not so much by
the reason of those who opposed it, as by
the examples which they set before my
?2 Tolerance.
eyes. They showed me my own city of
Hippo, which, after having belonged wholly
to the Donatists, was converted and re
united to the Catholic Church by the fear
of the imperial laws, and which has now
such a horror for that unhappy schism
that you could not believe that it had ever
been engaged in it." That method of con
version " by the fear of the imperial laws "
the great African bishop left firmly estab
lished in the Christian Church.
And so it remained through all the
Middle Ages, with only occasional out
breaks of local and individual remon
strance. It hardened into dogma, as at
the first Lateran Council. It blazed out
in fury, as when De Montfort slaughtered
the Albigenses in 1209. It struck its roots
deep as an institution when Innocent the
Third established the Inquisition in 1208.
The cloud broke open for a moment and
let a ray of sunlight through, as in the
teaching of a great, generous-hearted man
like Saint Bernard. There were pauses
First Lecture. 33
in the dreadful history of persecution be
cause there were times of absolute con
formity, when there were no heretics to
persecute ; but the whole dark tenor of
the mediaeval history is really one and
the same. It is what Saint Thomas
Aquinas wrote with such fearful, calm
deliberation and such blankly fallacious
reasoning: " If the corruptors of money,
and malefactors of other sorts, are at once
by secular princes justly given up to death,
much more may heretics, as soon as they
are convicted of their heresy, be not
merely excommunicated, but also justly
killed." That was the sum of mediaeval
logic on the matter.
The Protestant Reformation brought
no sudden change of theory. The prin
ciple of persecution was asserted by many
of the Reformed Confessions ; it was held
and declared by Luther, Calvin, Beza,
Knox, and even by Melanchthon, Cranmer,
and Ridley. " One mass," cried John
Knox, " is more fearful to me than if ten
3
34 Tolerance.
thousand armed enemies were landed in
any part of the re^lm." But though the
theory remained, it was soon evident that
another spirit was at work within it. Men
of light stood up here and there, and, full
of the belief in positive truth, still pleaded
for tolerance. Of all the Reformers, in
respect, Zwingli, who so often in the
days of darkness is the man of light, is
the noblest and clearest. At the confer
ence in the Marburg he contrasts most
favorably with Luther in his willingness
to be reconciled for the good of the com
mon cause ; and he was one of the very
few who in those days believed that the
good and earnest heathen could be saved.
The same reaching after better light ap-
pears in more unlikely places. Even Cal
vin, when he gave up the proofs of the
heresy of Servetus, was moved to say that
it seemed to him that since he did not
wield the sword of Justice, it was his duty
to confute heresy by sound doctrine, rather
than to seek to extirpate it by any other
First Lecture. 55
method ; and Oliver Cromwell, who, after
all, struck more nearly than any other
Englishman of his time the true note of
tolerance, wrote in his account of the
storming of Bristol, which was read in all
the congregations about London on the
2 ist of September, 1645 : " For, brethren,
in things of the mind we look for no com
pulsion but that of light and reason."
These men were dogmatists, distinctly
men of doctrine. It is a blessed thing
that in all times, and never more richly
than in the Reformation days, there have
always been other men to whom religion
has not presented itself as a system of
doctrine, but as an elemental life in which
the soul of man came into very direct and
close communion with the soul of God.
It is the mystics of every age who have
done most to blend the love of truth and
the love of man within the love of God,
and so to keep alive or to restore a healthy
tolerance. Indeed, the mystic spirit has
been almost like a deep and quiet pool in
36 Tolerance.
which tolerance, when it has been growing
old and weak, has been again and again
sent back to bathe itself and to renew its
youth and vigor. The German mystics of
the fourteenth century made ready for the
great enfranchisement of the fifteenth. The
English Platonists, who had the mystic
spirit very strongly, became almost the
re-creators of tolerance in the English
Church. The mysticism of to-day gives
great hope for the earnest freedom of the
future.
I must not try, interesting as the task
might be, to enter into the vexed question
of the tolerance or intolerance, or rather
the mixture of tolerance and intolerance,
in the men who brought the Christian
religion to our American shores, and espe
cially in the Puritans who came from Eng
land. Three things concerning them are
worthy of our notice, first, that the Puri
tans, who came direct from England, are
always to be distinguished from the Pil
grims, who came by way of Holland and
First Lecture. 37
caught some of the broader spirit of that
" nursery of freedom and good-will; " sec
ond, that the noblest utterance of hopeful
tolerance in all that noble century was in
the famous speech in which John Robinson,
their minister, bade loving farewell to his
departing flock at Leyden, in which occur
those memorable words : " I am verily
persuaded, I am very confident, that the
Lord has more truth yet to break out of
His holy Word ; " and thirdly, that some
where in the bitter heart of Puritanism was
hidden the power which, partly by devel
opment, and partly by reaction, was to
produce the freedom of these modern
days.
Confused, irregular, forever turning in
side out, forever going back upon itself,
the history of Christianity, however super-
ficially we glance at it, seems to bear wit
ness to three things, first, that every
hard bigotry is always on the brink of
turning into tolerance, and every loose tol
erance of hardening into bigotry; second,
38 Tolerance.
on the whole, positive belief and
tolerance are struggling toward a final har-
mony; and third, that true tolerance be
longs with profound piety and earnest
spiritual life. In those three facts lie
wrapped up together the philosophy and
the hope of tolerance.
There is one other study in the history
of tolerance to which I should like to point
your thoughts, but which it would need at
least a whole lecture to follow out in any
thing like complete detail. In modern
times there are six books, five of them
proceeding from the English race, and the
other one having close connection with
and influence upon that English race, all
of them books of remarkable literary and
historical value, which, taken together, pre
sent the feeling of our race toward toler
ance most picturesquely and correctly.
Let me recall to you their names, and
commend you to the study of them in
connection with each other.
Of these six books, three belong abso-
First Lecture. 39
lutely to the seventeenth century, one
hovers between the seventeenth and the
eighteenth, one is most characteristically
of the eighteenth, and one is a nineteenth-
century book through and through.
The first, of course, is Milton s stately
work, the " Areopagitica, or the Speech
for the Liberty of Unlicenc d Printing."
It was born of a special occasion in the
poet s life; but in it the noblest spirit
of his time finds utterance, as fire will
burst forth through any chink that offers.
Its style is like a king s robe, stiff with
embroidery of gold and jewels; but, as
always in Milton, the grandeur of lan
guage does not impair the clearness of the
thought. The book glows with the double
love of liberty and truth. Its argument is
in the first place for the reader s rights ; in
the second place for the impossibility of
enforcing censorship ; in the third place for
the incompetence of censors; and finally
for the dignity of the teacher. It is a
noble, all-embracing plea; and yet he
4O Tolerance.
draws back from its last conclusions. " I
mean not tolerated popery and open super
stition," he declares ; but when we are read
ing of the seventeenth century, we never
can forget that popery then was quite as
much a political as a religious question.
In 1644, the same year with Milton s
lofty work, there was put forth another,
which is to-day almost unknown. It wears
no king s robe, but rather the clumsy
gown of a Puritan saint. So quaint as to
be almost unreadable, full of forced con
ceits, involved and confused in plan and lan
guage, Roger Williams s " Bloody Tenent
of Persecution for Cause of Conscience " is
yet perhaps the broadest and most unhes
itating plea for tolerance in all its century.
It did great work, and excited fierce dis
cussion in its time. John Cotton, of Bos
ton, answered it, in the style of his day,
with " The Bloody Tenent of Persecution
washed and made white in the Blood of
the Lamb ; " to which the persecuted apos
tle of Rhode Island answered with " The
First Lecture. 41
Bloody Tenent yet more bloody by Mr.
Cotton s endeavor to wash it white." The
first book in the controversy is the only
valuable one of the series. It is a dia
logue between Truth and Peace. Its lan
guage, its imagery, and the grounds of its
argument are Scriptural. Its protest is
that the armies of Truth, like the armies
of the Apocalypse, " must have no sword,
helmet, breastplate, shield, or horse but
what is spiritual and of a heavenly nature."
In that statement there is the sum of the
whole matter.
After the Puritan and the Heretic comes
the Churchman. Bishop Jeremy Taylor s L
" Liberty of Prophesying " appeared in
1647. The music of the master of sen
tences is still in the world s ears. The
service which he rendered to the simplicity
of truth can never be forgotten. His dem
onstration of the futility of intolerance
leaves no room for dispute. And yet the
book has not the greatness of Milton s or
of Roger Williams s. It is the book of an
42 Tolerance.
ecclesiastic. It deals rather with the im
possibility of compulsion, as if, if it were
possible, compulsion would not be so bad
a thing. Its highest spirit is perhaps
summed up in one sentence, in which it
declares that " It is best every man be
left in that liberty from which no man can
justly take him unless he assure him from
error." Here there is an alternative sug
gested ; although it is also suggested that
that alternative is unlikely or impossible.
But the very suggestion makes us less sur
prised to hear how at the Restoration the
good bishop became at least a less ardent
champion of tolerance than he had been in
his days of exile and distress.
^Coleridge has compared Milton s work
with Taylor s, and has declared, with un
necessary harshness and insinuation, that
" the man who in reading the two does not
feel the contrast between the single-mind-
edness of the one, and the strabismus in
the other, is in the road to preferment."
On the other hand, our own historian,
First Lecture. 43
Bancroft, has a glowing passage
in which he makes comparison between
Jeremy Taylor and Roger Williams. The
latter he declares to be " the harbinger of
Milton and the precursor and superior of
Jeremy Taylor." "Taylor," he says, " lim
ited his toleration to a few Christian sects ;
the wisdom of Williams compassed man
kind." There is truth in what both Cole
ridge and Bancroft say ; and yet the " Lib
erty of Prophesying" had a place which
neither of the other books could have filled
in English life and literature and religion.
The fourth of the great books of toler-
A/ance is Locke s " Letter of Toleration/
which was published in 1689. By that
time the spirit of the eighteenth century
was already in the air, and the high ideal
life of the earlier part of the seventeenth
century had vanished. Locke belonged
to the coming age, which he was doing
more than any other Englishman to cre
ate; and his notion of tolerance is all
characteristic of himself. It is of the
44 Tolerance.
earth, earthy. It is all based on his con
tract theory of government. He denies
altogether that the care of souls belongs
to the civil magistrate, because it has never
been committed to him. His book is to
Milton s, or Williams s, or Taylor s, what
the lawyer in the community is to the
poet, the philanthropist, or the priest.
The most powerful and the most charac
teristic book of tolerance of the eighteenth
/ century, Lessing s " Nathan the Wise," be
longs not to England, but to Germany. Its
idea is that of the ring-story, which in it is
adapted from Boccaccio. Neither of the
three great religions, Jewish, Christian, or
Mohammedan, is exclusively or even pre
eminently true. Every man born in one
of them should tarry in his birthplace. It
is in the truest sense a book of scepticism.
The truth which it discovers, the inspira
tion it imparts, are of the sceptic s kind.
It is the book which springs from and
which serves a transition time. It is a
book for the world to rest on for a moment,
First Lecture. 45
and then almost immediately outgrow.
The far less-known work of Lessing, his
treatise on "The Education of the Human
Race," is a much nobler book, and in its
indirect and more unconscious way does
greater work for tolerance.
And so, to come to our own age, there
is no need to do more than name John
J
Stuart Mill s "On Liberty" as the utter
ance of the true nineteenth-century voice
on tolerance. It is utilitarian in a very
high but a very distinct sense. The use
fulness of tolerance; how both silenced
truth and silenced error, and men who
need truth, and the institutions of men
which need men who have free access to
discussion; how all of these will suffer if
thought be enchained, this is his argu
ment. The usefulness of tolerance, not
directly its glory, its obligation, or its
sacredness, the usefulness of tolerance Vx"
is what our prophet of the nineteenth cen
tury stands up to proclaim with his clear
logic and strong style.
46 Tolerance.
These are the six books. The first are
greater than the last. The first three
books strike a more lofty note and paint
a purer color, because they define a higher
motive of tolerance than the last three.
This is because the seventeenth century is
higher than the eighteenth, and because,
after all, the best spirit of the nineteenth
century is not really in its book on toler
ance. Perhaps it is not in the tolerance of
our time itself. Century of tolerance as
ours is, we all know how much of the deep
est spiritual life of our time, while it may
have looked with no dislike upon the tol
erant dispositions which were all about it,
has not directly and enthusiastically lent
them its inspiration.
And this leads me at once to what I
want to say about the closing portion of
my theme, the hope of tolerance. I have
spoken quite in vain unless you see how
deeply I believe that the value of tolerance
lies in its devoutness. I have tried to show
not merely that a man may be cordially
First Lecture. 47
tolerant and yet be devoutly spiritual, but
also that a man cannot attain to the highest
tolerance without being devoutly spiritual.
Too long have piety and tolerance seemed
to be open foes, or to keep but an armed
truce with one another. Too long have
young thinkers on religion imagined that it
was disloyal to the truth they held, and to
the Master whom they loved, to strive after
cordial sympathy with and understanding
of the earnest men and systems who were
farthest from their truth and from their
Master. Here is the first hope for toler-
ance, not for its wider extent, but for its
better kind. It will grow more and more
religious. It will be filled with deeper
piety. We shall not in moral perplexity
hope that a man may be tolerant in spite
of his devoutness; we shall confidently
expect a man to be tolerant because he is
devout. The first duty, I think, of the
young students of to-day, whose mature
work lies in the future, is to adjust their
minds to that expectation, and always to
48 Tolerance.
make themselves think of piety and toler
ance, not as enemies, but as dear friends.
When the time comes in which that
friendship of piety and tolerance shall be
fully asserted and accepted, then will be
written a greater book than any of those
which have been dedicated to the praise of
Freedom. Then the Milton or the Mill of
that distant day, inspired with a yet more
glowing love for liberty, feeling the power
of a divine utilitarianism, will be able to
describe .tolerance so that it shall seem
to be not, as it has so often seemed, the
license of self-will or the refuge of despair,
but the broadest and deepest obedience of
the soul to Christ, and the full flower of the
ripest piety of the most earnest sainthood.
In such presentation of herself, which is
her only true presentation, Tolerance must
claim the heart of the world.
Until that day arrives it is our duty to
strive that tolerance shall not be travestied
and misdescribed either by bigotry on the
one side, or by what is called "free thought"
First Lecture. 49
upon the other. Before all efforts for the
extension of any principle or power must
always come the effort to understand and
to define it rightly ; we must know what it
is before we can be enthusiastic for it our
selves, or enthusiastically urge it on our
fellow-men.
In all this long lecture I have not till
now attempted to give a definition of tole
rance. I have felt almost as one feels
about life, that he wants to live before he
tries to tell himself or his brethren what
life is; but now may we not say of tole
rance that it is this : " The willing consent
that other men should hold and express
opinions with which we disagree, until they
are convinced by reason that those opin
ions are untrue"? There are five things
involved in that definition which I must
beg you to notice. First, the consent is
willing; it is no mere yielding of despair.
It might have all the power to put down
the error by force which pope or parlia
ment ever possessed, and it would never
4
50 Tolerance.
for a moment dream of using it. On the
v/ other hand, secondly, it is simply consent.
Tolerance is not called upon to champion
the cause in which it disbelieves, nor to
lend trumpets through which what it be
lieves to be error may be blown. For,
thirdly, it is of the very essence of tolerance
that there should be disagreement; and
disagreement involves the positive con
viction on which I have insisted all this
evening. And, fourthly, the error which
is not to be yielded until it is convinced of
its untruth by reason, must be attacked by
reason ; and so the right and the duty of
earnest discussion is included as a part
s/of tolerance. And, fifthly, the tolerance
which is patient toward what it counts
honest error, is utterly impatient toward
dishonesty, toward hypocrisy, toward self-
conceit, toward cant, whether it be on the
side of what the honest man thinks to be
error, or of that which he thinks to be true.
v /There is a moral intolerance which must go
with intellectual tolerance to give it vigor.
First Lecture. 51
Cordial, discriminating, positive, out
spoken, conscientious : all these things the
perfect tolerance must be ; all these things
it is bound to be by its very definition.
Keeping these qualities, which must be
long to the perfect tolerance, clearly in our
minds, are there not certain things which
we may say with regard to the way in
which that perfect tolerance will some day
or other come to be the established condi
tion and the ruling power of the world?
1 . I have already said, at most abundant
length, that it cannot come about by mere
indifference.
2. Equally sure is it that it cannot come
by mere eclecticism. That is the dream
that haunts some amiable minds. Some day,
so such minds fancy, some great peace
maker will pick out from every system of
thought its choicest dogma, and setting
them together, will build a dogmatic home
where every soul shall be completely satis
fied, because when it looks up it will see
its own chief article of faith set in a place
52 Tolerance.
of honor in the walls. It will accept the
dogmas of the other souls because of the
light which they will get from this of its,
and it will cease to mourn for the rest of
its cherished possessions which have no
place in the new structure, because of its
thankfulness that this its principal treasure
has been saved.
Of all the stories of eclecticism, I think
that none is more interesting than that
of the great Akbar, the mighty Mogul
Emperor, him whom Max Miiller calls
" the first student of comparative reli
gions." He lived and died almost three
centuries ago ; but his story reads like a
record of life in one of the great cities of
to-day. In his palace at Agra he held his
Friday evenings, when Buddhist, Hindu,
Mussulman, Sun-worshipper, Fire-worship
per, Jew, Jesuit, and Sceptic, all came and
argued, and the great monarch sat and
stirred the waters, and gathered out of the
turmoil whatever pearl was anywhere cast
up to the top. He did not exactly, like a
First Lecture. 53
modern lady of society, invite a college
professor to lecture to her friends upon the
Infinite, in her parlor, on a summer s after
noon ; but he hung a Brahmin in a basket
outside his chamber window, and bade him
thence discourse to him of Brahma, Vishnu,
Rama, and Krishna, till the great Akbar
dropped asleep. The result was an eclec
tic faith, a state religion, a thing of
shreds and patches, devised by the inge
nious monarch, enforced by his authority,
accepted by his obsequious courtiers, and
dropping to pieces and perishing as soon
as he was dead. It was the old first fatal
difficulty of eclecticism, that each man
wants to make his own selection, and no
man can choose for others, but only for
himself.
3. Nor is the promise of the future to be
found in the idea that some day one of the
present forms of faith, one of the present
conceptions of God and man and life, shall
so overwhelmingly assert its truth that
every other form of faith shall come and
54 Tolerance.
lay its claims before its feet and ask to be
obliterated and absorbed. Truth has not
anywhere been so monopolized. And no
man who delights in the activity of the
human mind as the first condition of the
attainment of final truth by man, can think
complacently of any period short of the
perfect arrival at the goal of absolute cer
tainty with reference to all knowledge,
when man shall cease to wonder and cease
to inquire, and so pass out of the possi
bility of error and mistake.
4. And yet, again, our hope cannot lie
contentedly in the anticipation of a mere
superficial unity of organization and of
government which will cover over and
make men forget the differences of
thought and opinion which lie in their
unreconciled diversity below. Great is
the craving after unity, so great, so
deep, so universal, that we know it is a
part of God s first purpose for humanity,
and never can die out till it has found
its satisfaction. But it is too great and
First Lecture. 55
deep ever to find its final satisfaction
in identity of organization. You cannot
make the unit to be a unit by the exter
nal unity of one hard shell. If the fruit
which you try to enclose is alive, it will
burst your shell to pieces as it grows. If
it be dead, your shell will soon hold only
a dry and rattling remnant, to which it
can give no life. No, the real unity of
Christendom is not to be found at last in
identity of organization, nor in identity of
dogma. Both of those have been dreamed
of, and have failed. But in the unity of
spiritual consecration to a common Lord
so earnestly sought by every soul that,
though their apprehension of Him whom
they are seeking shall be as various as
are the lights into which a hundred jewels
break the self-same sunlight the search
shall be so deep a fact, so much the deep
est fact in every soul, that all the souls
shall be one with each other in virtue of
that simple fact, in virtue of that com
mon reaching after Christ, that common
5<5 Tolerance.
earnestness of loyalty to what they know
of Him. There is the only unity that
is thoroughly worthy either of God or
man.
That seems to many men, I know, to be
dim and vague. It is a terrible and sad
sign of how far our Christianity is from
its perfection that now, after these centu
ries of its sway, the central key and secret
of its power should seem dim and vague
to men. But the hope of the future,
the certainty of the future, is that the per
sonality of Christ, as holding the loyalty
and love of all the varying orders of
mankind, and making them one in their
common affection and obedience to Him,
is to become more and more real with
every Christian generation, till it is at last
for all mankind, as it is now for multi
tudes of earnest souls, the reallest thing in
all the world. Organizations and dogmas
are of aid as they help to that. When
that shall come, in the degree in which
that shall have come in any age, tolerance
First Lecture. 57
will fill that age as it at last must fill the
world with its great, active, thoughtful,
stimulating, sympathetic peace.
It must follow from all this that toler
ance is to come about, not by any trans
action, not by compacts and bargains, not
by deliberate concession and compromise,
but by the rising flood of life. Its hope
lies in the advancing spirituality of man.
He who hopes for it, let him hope for it
thus profoundly. He who fears it, let
him take comfort in the assurance that it
can never come except with such a deeper
occupation of the life of man by God as
shall rob it of all the dangers which he
fears.
I turn to you, the students of theology,
of God, of science, and of human life,
the future ministers of Christ. You
must be men, you must be ministers, of
tolerance. But the true way in which you
can be that is to forget tolerance and be
ever more and more completely men of
truth and men of Christ. So you must
5# Tolerance.
be led on into that only worthy tolerance
which, as I have tried to show to-night,
and as I should like to say once more be-
J fore I close, consists of the love of truth
and the love of man harmonized and in
cluded in the love of God.
SECOND LECTURE.
GENTLEMEN :
THE second of the great Mogul emper
ors, the wise and energetic Jahangir, used
to have a chain hung down from his cita
del to the ground, communicating with a
cluster of golden bells in his own chamber,
so that every suitor might apprise the
monarch of his demand for justice with
out the intervention of the courtiers. It
would be interesting to know what the
courtiers thought of such an apparatus.
No doubt there were some to whom it
was a great offence. Full of the thought
of themselves, it seemed an insult and im
pertinence that any of his people should
presume to approach their lord except
through them. There must have been
6o Tolerance.
other more generous natures who rejoiced
that, however irregularly, the direct and
fundamental relation between the monarch
and his people should be recognized, and
that the meanest man in all the kingdom
might send his complaint or his petition
direct to the king s ear. Doubtless also
there were those in whose breasts the
sight of the hanging chain wakened self-
questionings. Why was it that such an
apparatus was required? Why should
not these petitioners send their petitions
through the appointed channels? Had
the courtiers perhaps made their courtier-
ship too narrow and unsympathetic to be
the medium of interpretation between the
people and their lord?
All three of these suggestions come
into the mind of the Christian Church
when it sees human souls, apart from her
ordinances and institutions, seeking the
ear and heart of God. The first thought
springs up in the baser portion of the
Church s heart; the other two are good
Second Lecture. 61
and healthy. One of them is thankful
that, valuable as the Church is to the soul
and to the world, every son of God has
still open to him that power of direct
appeal and personal approach which the
Church is meant to stimulate and help, but
never to deny or supersede. The other
thought keeps the Church full of wakeful-
ness and watchfulness, ever on the alert to
see how she can make herself less un
worthy of her mission, a truer and broader
minister of God to man. Both together
preserve in the Church the spirit of
tolerance.
May I not, as I begin to speak this
evening to you, students of divinity,
men who very soon will make a part of
the Church s ministry, pause for a mo
ment with a word of exhortation, and beg
you never, in your thankfulness for all
the Church s blessed richness, to forget the
personal belonging of the child to the
Father, of the human soul to God, which
lies behind all that the Church can be or
62 Tolerance.
do. There will come times when in your
own deepest need or loftiest exaltation you
will forget that you are ministers, and
simply know yourselves as men, children
of God. Then you will come directly to
Him heart to heart. There are times
when the courtiers themselves, leaving the
whole courtly ceremonial aside, will touch
the chain and ring the golden bells. Let
such moments interpret to you the simple,
personal, unchurchly religious impulses
which make up so much of the world s
religion. Let such moments at once fill
you with a deep sense of the reality and
value of many a religious experience of
which the Church in her institutional life
takes no account, and let it also make you
anxious that the Church should be so simple
and true and human, so full of love and
faithfulness to human nature, that more
and more of the religious life of man may
find its ministry and help in her. The
channel which is not wide enough to con
tain the full torrent of the spring-time is
Second Lecture. 63
thankful that the drops she cannot hold
find wayward courses of their own down
to the sea; and at the same time she
makes herself wider and wider, that more
and more of the water may find way
through her.
And now there are several subjects sug
gested by what I said the other evening
of which I should like to speak to you
to-night with more or less of order and
coherence. I said then, you remember,
that tolerance, so far from being a thing
of loose beliefs and feeble earnestness, had
its real life in certain convictions and pro
found piety. If this be so, then it is surely
true that the Church, which is the home of
clear faith and spiritual consecration, ought
to be the citadel of tolerance ; and we, mem
bers and ministers of the Church, ought
to look forward to the time when, setting
distinctly before the world the true nature
of this grace, she shall attract men by its
beauty and win men to it and to herself.
But now it is time for us to note a
64 Tolerance.
distinction which has no doubt occurred to
a good many of your minds while I have
spoken. When we speak of tolerance, we
may have in our minds either one of two
classes of things and thoughts toward
which the tolerant disposition is de
manded; and we may easily be led to
draw a line between them, and say:
" Toward one class tolerance is good ;
but toward the other class, how is toler-
v/ ance possible?" There is the tolerance
toward other forms of good thinking and
good working than our own ; and there is
the tolerance toward forms of working and
thinking which we do not at all hold to be
good, but totally and irremediably bad.
The first thing which we can say with
regard to that distinction is, that it is one
of which we never ought to think that we
can be absolutely sure at first sight. Our
sense of the value of our way of working,
if it is very deep, as it ought to be, in
order to make our work vital and enthusi
astic, is almost sure to blur the distinc-
Second Lecture. 65
tion between the work and the way of
doing it, to make the color seem part of
the substance, to make the man who is
doing the same work in another way ap
pear to be doing another work. Nowhere -
does a man need more clearness of mind
and soul than here. The only thing that vx
can keep him absolutely true is such a
pure value for the thing itself, such a
desire and craving for the success of the
essential work, as shall compel it always
to stand out before the thought sharp and
distinguishable from all the ways in which
the work is being done.
But granting that this distinction can
be kept, then the objects for our tolerance
fall into the two classes of which I spoke. */
First, there are the opinions which wex/ x
recognize as probably or possibly present
ing other sides of truth than ours. Here
everything ought to be clear and easy, if
we understand human nature. God has
made man with two powers in relation to
the laying hold on truth: one of these ^
5
66 Tolerance.
powers is general, the other special. By
one of them man values truth in its es- \/
sence, laying hold upon the fundamental
difference between truth and falsehood;
by the other, expressing itself in his pecu
liar faculties and character, he seizes upon
particular forms or kinds of truth and
makes them distinctively his own. The
true student is aware of both of these
powers, and never lets them lose them
selves in one another. " I love truth/ he
says, sweeping into the range of his affec
tion all the unknown truth that every spe
cial scholar is discovering in the most
distant regions of investigation. What the
astronomer is seeing in the skies, and the
mathematician in the mystery of form and
number, and the metaphysician in the soul
of man, all these the truth-lover claims
for his own as he stands at the heart of
things and says, " I love truth." And yet
this does not hinder him from putting
forth his special faculty and comprehend
ing, as we say, one special kind of truth,
Second Lecture. 6j
and enthusiastically declaring, " This is
my truth." This double hold on truth is
all-important. If the first element is lost,
the scholar narrows to a meagre special
ist ; if the second element grows weak, he
fades into a vague and abstract theorist.
He must have both. But he is very sure
not to have both ; he is very sure to lose
the larger hold on truth in its essence,
truth as truth, unless he knows, and
is rejoiced to know, that other men are
holding other truths than his; and what
we are used to call other sides of truth
are really other truths. It is very like our
conception of the world we live in. I love
my country, and I love the whole earth;
but my love for the total earth would fade
and grow dim if I did not realize and re
joice that men with my humanity were liv
ing at the Tropics and at Baffin s Bay. It
is in virtue of my being at once an Ameri
can and a man that my intelligence and my
love can take possession of the world.
Therefore no man is truly tolerant who
68 Tolerance.
does not merely consent, but rejoice that
other men think differently from himself
regarding those subjects of thought which
are capable of various apprehension. I
have heard some of our bishops declare
with thankfulness and pride that there was
no difference of opinion in their dioceses ;
that all the clergy (I suppose they would
hardly undertake to answer for all the laity
there) thought alike. I know some minis
ters who want all their parishioners to think
after their fashion, and are troubled when
any of their people show signs of thinking
for themselves and holding ideas which the
minister does not hold. Thank God, the
human nature is too vital, especially when it
is inspired with such a vital force as Chris
tian faith, to yield itself to such unworthy
slavery. Many and many is the minister
who, when his people have first gone forth,
full of the fire which God has sent to them
through him, to think of God as he taught
them to think of Him, has by and by
become a learner from his people s lives,
Second Lecture. 69
and found in their experience how good it
is that the divine light shines on many
mirrors and completes its revelation in no
single soul !
Of the other class of things of which I
spoke, the case is different. I am not called ^
upon, nay, I am not at liberty, to rejoice
in the existence of any opinion which I
know to be untrue. I am not called upon,
nay, I have no right, to be thankful that my
neighbor is an atheist, and denies the truth
of God s being, which is to me the glory
and the inspiration of all life. Tolerance
toward him means something different
from a glad sense that he fills out my par
tial truth with something which it lacked.
Tolerance toward him means two things. v
It means, first, a cordial and thankful rec- *
ognition of all the good personal charac
ter which there is in him, including most
carefully the frankness and honesty which
makes him clearly face and openly declare
this very atheism which distresses and
offends my soul. It means, in the second
70 Tolerance.
place, the full acceptance of the idea that
it is only by the persuasion of reason that
this atheism can be legitimately attacked
and overthrown. Where these two ele
ments, personal respect and confidence in
reason only as the means of conversion,
are present, tolerance is perfect. Then the
strong platform is built on which you can
meet your atheist or unbeliever and wage
strong warfare for the truth which you
believe. Upon that platform let no earn
estness be spared. One of the worst things
about intolerance is that its puts an end to
manly controversy. Calvin cannot argue
with Servetus when he is putting the fire
to the fuel which surrounds his victim at
the stake. Laud cannot demonstrate epis
copacy to the Puritans whom he despises
and believes that it is right to put down
by force. The only atmosphere in which
strong, manly controversy, which is one of
the noblest activities on earth, can truly live
and flourish, is the atmosphere of toler
ance, an atmosphere whose elements are
Second Lecture. 77
respect for personal qualities and trust in
the power of truth.
All this applies especially to that which
often seems to be the hardest kind of toler
ance, which is the tolerance of intolerance.-
Very often this is the last infirmity of libe
ral minds. After you have conquered or
outgrown all your unwillingness that men
should think in enterprising and dangerous
ways, you turn and look in on yourself,
only to find your soul full of uncharitable
thoughts towards men who still are keep
ing the reluctance which you used to feel.
Until you get rid of those thoughts you are
not fully tolerant. It is possible to get rid
of them. Towards the narrow-minded bigot
both of the dispositions of which I spoke
may come into full play. You may feel in
his bigotry the high quality of personal sin
cerity, and you may cordially own that not
even so unpleasant a usurper as his bigotry
must be attacked with any other artillery
but reason. So you may be tolerant even
of intolerance, which is very hard.
72 Tolerance.
2. I pass on, next, to speak of the way in
which the question of tolerance is related
to the declared and visible fellowships of
men. It may be that what I have said
thus far has seemed too large. Intoler
ance, as it exists to-day, does not, con
sciously and declaredly, at least, seek to
banish from existence those with whom it
disagrees. It says only that it cannot in
clude them in the group of privileged
men, in the community, the society, the
church which holds only those who think
aright. Let us look at this for a few
moments.
We must remember, then, that there is
more than one fellowship which must be
taken into account in estimating a man s
relation to his fellow-men. Every true
Churchman, that is, every man who truly
values his place in the Christian Church,
it seems to me, must think of himself as
standing in the midst of four concentric
circles. He is the centre of them all.
They represent the different groups of his
Second Lecture. 7^
fellow-men with whom he has to do. They
sweep in widening circumference around the
spot of earth on which he stands, and make
the different horizons of his life. What
are they? Outermost of all, there is the
broad circle of humanity. All men, simply
as men, are something to this man. It is
the consciousness " Homo sum," the con
sciousness which the Latin poet crowded
into his immortal line, which fills this circle
with vitality. Next within this lies the v
circle of religion, smaller than the other,
because all men are not religious, but large
enough to include all those of every name,
of every creed, who count their life the sub
ject and the care of a Divine life which is
their king. Next within this lies the circle v
of Christianity, including all those who,
under any conception of Him and of their
duty toward Him, honestly own for their
Master Jesus Christ. And then, inmost of
/
all, there is the circle of the man s own
peculiar Church, the group of those whose
thought and worship is in general identical
^4 Tolerance.
with his who stands in the centre and feels
all these four circles surrounding him.
Can you not seem to see him standing
there in the midst of these circumferences?
And the first thing of importance is that
each one of the four should be real to
their central man, and never wholly lost
out of his consciousness. It will not do
for either of them to become unreal; all
the others will surely suffer if it does. To
the true disciple, to the real member of the
Church of Christ, it must still be a fact
of which he is aware, and which he thinks
most important, that he belongs with other
Christians who think of Christ differently
from himself, and with religious men who
never heard of Christ, and with all men
simply in virtue of their being men,
whether they are religious men or not.
Of course the relationships with all these
groups are different. The four radii of the
four circles vary very much in length.
The inmost circle nestles to its centre with
a warmth of sympathy which the others
Second Lecture. 75
do not know. That is all right. But the
important point is that they all are real.
There come times in the life of the mem
ber of Christ s Church when he needs each
one of these four horizons of life, times
when the close foreground of completest
sympathy is what his soul requires ; times
when the middle distance of a more gen
eral unity of faith, a unity with those who
own and love the same Christ differently
conceived, or with those whose souls are
touched with the same great general aspi
rations in some pagan faith, enlarges his
view of the presence of God in the world ;
still other times, when nothing short
of the great mountain-tops of humanity
which stand around all special human liv
ing and thinking will satisfy his gaze.
I value very much this doctrine of the
concentric circles, this doctrine of the four
horizons, because I think that in forgetful-
ness of it lies the secret of many of the
corruptions of the Church s faith and life.
The " unity of faith ! " we say. Of course
7<5 Tolerance.
those words have their most close and
sacred meaning, as they express the deep
sympathy of men who in almost all points
of belief see eye to eye, and perfectly
agree, men who delight in the common
service of a Master whom they understand
alike. But that inmost unity of faith grows
weak and narrow unless the men who feel
it feel also constantly the unities of faith
which lie beyond. I cannot live truly with
the men of my own Church unless I also
have a consciousness of common life with
all Christian believers, with all religious
men, with all mankind.
And then we note another thing: not
merely are these four circles all real to the
true Churchman, the circles of human
ity, of religion, of Christianity, and of his
Church ; they also feel each other, and the
inner and smaller are always reaching out
ward to the larger. The Churchman as he
lives in all of them becomes aware that,
actually distinct as they are now, they are
ideally and essentially identical with one
Second Lecture. 77
another. He feels a throb and thrill
through all the system, which he finds to
be the effort of the smaller circle to em
brace the larger. Each smaller circle is
restless and discontented until it at least
has touched the larger circumference of
which it always is aware. The special
Church reaches out and craves to enlarge
itself until it shall be able to include within
itself all Christianity. Christianity is anx
ious to claim all the religious life of all the
world for Christ; and true religion grows
more and more anxious to declare that re
ligion is not something foreign to human
ity, that it is simply the fullest utterance of
human life, that all human life which is not
religious falls below itself. Not man with
religion is something more, but man with
out religion is something less, than man.
Most interesting is this perpetual out
reach, this throb and struggle of the
inner circles to fill the outer circles with
themselves. But it touches our present
purpose only so far as it describes the
j8 Tolerance.
relation between the inmost circle and the
one that lies next beyond it, the circle
of the Church and the circle of general
Christianity. There it touches directly
upon most important questions, upon
questions which you, young clergymen,
will have to meet almost as soon as you
find yourselves ordained. The Church
horizon, as I said, is always reaching out
toward the Christian horizon and trying
to identify itself with it. If it could per
fectly do so, all would be well. But there
is not a Church in Christendom which can
do so to-day. There is not a Church in
Christendom not ours, nor any other
which is not forced to own that there are
men whom she will freely acknowledge to
be Christian men, whom yet she is not
ready and fit to receive into full commu
nion and membership with herself, into full
acceptance of her privileges and full en
joyment of her influence. Some dogma
doubted, or some dogma held, or some
peculiarity of thought or feeling on their
Second Lecture. 79
part, stands in the way. Some excess or
some defect of faith keeps the Christian
outside the Christian Church !
Is it not so? I can see nothing to do
but frankly to face the fact and own it.
A man comes to you, who are a minister
of our Church, and tells you of his faith,
tells you how earnestly he loves, how
deeply he honors, the Lord Jesus Christ,
tells you how he is trying to give his
whole life up to the Master s service. Is
he a Christian? Of course he is; you
cannot doubt a moment. You are sure
what the Lord would have said if He had
met him in Jerusalem. But can you,
simply and solely because he is a Chris
tian, throw wide the door and bid him wel
come to our Church s inmost privileges?
Are there no tests of doctrine, no speci
fied ways of worship, no definitions of
orthodoxy, which lie within the defini
tions of the absolute truth, which you must
apply before you can bid that Christian
welcome to the Church and feel that he
8o Tolerance.
and it belong together? If there are,
then the Church is not prepared to-day
to make herself identical with Christian
ity. If the chance to do so were freely
given her, she is not ready to accept it.
Therefore she is not catholic; she is not
prepared to lay claim to universality.
And what must be the consequence of
such a state of things? Must there not
be two consequences? The first conse
quence must be a perpetual restlessness
under her own restraint, a perpetual de
sire to make all thought orthodox which
is true, and all action legitimate which is
really helpful to the human soul. We
ought to be very thankful for every such
disposition wherever it shows itself in our
Church. We ought to be very glad when,
reaching out in either way, either back
into the past, gathering up any disused
method which the Church may have now
grown wise enough to use; or forward
into the future, eagerly claiming any light
which free-minded criticism and enlarged
Second Lecture. 81
knowledge can throw upon the pages of
the Bible, the Church grows broader in
spirit, more ready to do the work of God
and to meet the religious needs of man.
The other consequence must be a cor
dial tolerance. So long as any Church is
aware that there are Christians to whom
she, as she is now constituted, cannot
open her doors, she must be more than
content she must be thankful and re
joice that there are forms of worship
and groups of believers in which those
Christians for whom she has no place may
find fellowship with one another and feed
their souls with truth. While she is ever
trying to make her own embrace more
large, to bring herself into a true iden
tity with the absolute Christianity, she will
be glad enough that in the mean time the
souls for which she has no place are not
to go unhoused, that there are other
Church homes than her own in which
they may live, that she is not the whole
Church, that in the largest and truest
6
82 Tolerance.
sense the Church, even to-day, does em
brace all servants of Christ in their innu
merable divisions. Such souls there must
be so long as there is no Church in the
world which is exactly coincident with
essential Christianity, no Church which
makes the standards of her membership
exactly the same, not one whit more, as
well as not one whit less than the standard
by which a man would have a right to
count himself and to think that Christ
would count him a true servant of the
Lord of Christians. If there are two cir
cles, one less than the other, those who live
in the space between the two must be ac
counted for. This is the ground on which
the man and the minister who believes
most enthusiastically in his own Church
may yet keep nay, must yet keep
a true tolerance for other churches.
The great safeguard and assurance of
the tolerant spirit in the Christian minister
then lies in the clear distinctness of these
four horizons about the central point on
Second Lecture. 83
which he stands. He does not stand re
lated to them all alike ; one presses more
closely than another on his life. But to
know that he has relations to them all, and
to keep those relations distinct and true,
that is his safety. First, and most cen
trally, he is a man of his own Church.
Her doctrines he believes, her methods he
devoutly uses, her history he studies. By
her peculiar genius his life is colored and
inspired. He never dreams of anything
but loyalty to her. But he goes out be
yond her in his interest and study, and
tries sympathetically to understand all that
the Christian workers are doing, all that
the Christian thinkers and scholars are dis
covering, in any of the rich fields in which
they work. He is a Christian, and nothing
done or thought in the name of Christ is
foreign or alien to him. Then he goes
out to a still wider circle. All that the
religious life of the world before Christ
and aside from Christ has been and has
accomplished, is of interest to this man
84 Tolerance.
standing in his central Church. Not in
supercilious pity, not in a spirit of cap-
tiousness which tries only to see their
weaknesses and faults, but with a pro
found reverence for them all as true reve
lations of his own beloved God, as faint
shinings through the cloud of his own en
lightening Christ, so does the true Church
man study the religions of the ages
and of the world. He reveres in them the
God ever ready to show Himself to His
children, and the soul of man ever reach
ing forth, blindly, awkwardly, stumblingly,
but with an irrepressible persistency to find
the Father. And then, last of all, man,
all that he has been, all that he is, all that
he is making of this wonderful, beautiful
world; man with his history, his poetry,
his art, his science ; man very often in his
deepest godlessness bearing most convinc
ing witness of God by the way in which he
shows his need of Him man in his simple
manhood makes the largest circle which
surrounds this central life.
Second Lecture. 85
Do you not see how every study in
which it is possible for man to engage may
be a true part of the minister s preparation
for his work? Christianity in all its forms,
comparative religion, human life, the world
he lives in, all these he must know in some
degree, in as great degree as is in his power.
Is he not the most central man in all the
world? Must he not be inspired and filled
with devoutness, vitality, and tolerance as
he stands in the midst of his horizons?
3. Let me pass to another topic. The
question of tolerance will probably always
be connected with the question of penalty. N
Not that they are necessarily connected;
it is possible for a man to be intolerant of
an opinion different from his own, and yet
never to feel that he has a right to assign a
penalty to the holding of that opinion, or
even to want to say what will befall the
man who holds it. Penalty is the shadow
which condemnation casts when it shines
down smitingly upon the thing which it
condemns. No doubt sometimes the con-
86 Tolerance.
demnation may take place in such a clear,
diffused light of pure thought that it may
cast no shadow. The intolerant man
may be content to say, " I hold that
opinion to be wholly base and wrong and
mischievous, and I would put it down even
by force if I could," and yet may not be
tempted on to denounce punishment upon
the man who believes that opinion to be
true. I do not doubt that there is a great
deal of such intolerance as that. Many
people are ready to believe that with the
passing away of the use of axe and fagot
in religious persecution all pronouncing of
penalty in religious differences has disap
peared. I wish that it were so. The evil
of intolerance would be vastly less if it
simply denounced and upbraided the opin
ion with which it disagreed, and did not go
farther, and condemn it to a punishment,
the fear of which once attached to any
opinion is a most serious obstacle to the
discovery of the degree of truth which
that opinion may contain.
Second Lecture. 8j
" But," people say, " how is this pos
sible? Now that we cannot burn our
heretics, and now that they do not mind
our excommunications, how can there be
such a thing as persecution any more?"
I answer, " If it be possible to keep alive
the idea if in some of her teachings the
Church does keep alive the idea that
wrong opinions about God and Christ and
salvation are not merely to show their
influence in hampered and harmed lives,
but are also to be definitely punished by
God as wickedness, then the most terri
ble form of persecution is still possible."
People used to shut out a certain doctrine
from the reach of fair inquiry by decreeing
that whoever came to believe that doctrine
should be stretched upon the rack, and
then be led through the hooting streets in
a disgraceful dress, and at last burned with
fire in the public square. What terror had
a penalty like that compared with the
terror which belongs to this other threat,
which declares or implies that he who
88 Tolerance.
believes this or disbelieves that shall per
ish everlastingly? Can such a declaration
still let the soul be free to seek for truth?
Must it not make very difficult, if not im
possible, that search after the truth mixed
and hidden in the error which ought to be
our strongest desire when we deal with
things which we esteem erroneous?
I cannot doubt that the present confused
and rebellious condition of men s minds
with regard to the punishments of the
future life comes in part, and in large part,
from the way in which punishment in all
ages of the Church has been denounced
upon speculative opinions and earnest con
victions. Bidden to believe that souls
would be punished for wrong-thinking,
people have come to doubt whether souls
would be punished for anything at all.
The only possibility of any light upon the
darkness, any order in the confusion, must
lie in the clear and unqualified assertion
that such as God is can punish such as
men are for nothing except wickedness,
Second Lecture. 89
and that honestly mistaken opinions are
not wicked. How a clear assertion of such
a simple truth as that cuts the knot of
sophistry at once; how it makes the whole
system of persecution for opinion s sake
appear impossible ! It would have seemed
as if that simple truth were quite self-
evident. But it is not. The whole long,
awful history of persecution and torture
for opinion s sake proves that it is not.
A multitude of men to-day have aban
doned the idea of persecuting their breth
ren for their opinions, only because they
either, on the one hand, have seen the
hopelessness and uselessness of it, or else,
upon the other hand, have been willing
to leave the punishment of the errorist to
God. That sort of tolerance is superficial
and unstable. The only ground for us to
take is simply the broad ground that error
is not punishable at all. Error is not
guilt. The guilt of error is the fallacy and
fiction which has haunted good men s
minds. It has not always stood out plain
90 Tolerance.
and clear; such fictions seldom do. It
has been mixed with thoughts of the mis-
chievousness of error, and with suspicions
of the maliciousness of error; but always
lying in behind, in the centre of the im
pulse which made man persecute his
brother man for what he thought, there
has been the idea that error was guilt.
We must get rid of that entirely. Error
is not like guilt; error is like disease.
Behind disease there may lie guilt as a
cause, the man may have been wicked,
and so made himself sick ; and so a man
may have been reckless, defiant, sophisti
cal, selfish, wicked in many ways, and so
have plunged himself into error. But he
may have fallen into error without any
such wickedness; and even if his error
be the fruit of wickedness, it is in the
wickedness, the moral wrong, and not in
the error which has proceeded from it,
that the guilt lies.
Guilt could be inseparably attached to
error only on the assumption that there
Second Lecture. 91
was on earth some revelation of God s
truth so absolutely sure and clear that no
honest man could possibly mistake it, so
sure and clear that any man who mistook
it must necessarily be wanton and obsti
nate and disobedient; and such a revela
tion certainly does not exist, and never has
existed on the earth.
The most striking indications, to my
mi-nd, that error is not guilt, and does not
properly call forth those emotions which
only guilt ought to produce, lies in the
way in which many opponents of error
feel called on to ascribe base motives to
the men who hold it. They have to turn
error into moral wrong before they can
abuse it as only moral wrong deserves to
be abused. They are like the Inquisitors
of old, who when they led their victims to
the stake, dressed them in grotesque and
horrid garments that the populace along
the street might forget that they were
men, and hoot at them with free voices and
consciences as if they were fiends. When
g2 Tolerance.
a controversialist, arguing against a certain
doctrine which he thinks all wrong, charges
its upholders with " the subtlety of the
adulterer and the cold-blooded cruelty of
the assassin," have we not a clear token
of misgiving ; have we not a sign that he
himself believes that not in pure error, but
only in malignant dispositions found or
feigned in errorists, is their real guilt or
the real ground of moral reprobation of
their thinking?
Once get rid of the whole notion that
error is in itself a guilty thing, and two
good results must follow, first, moral in
dignation, called back from the false scent
on which it has been wasting itself, will
have its time and strength to give to those
things which are really worthy of its hatred.
Again and again in history the Church,
pursuing error with her anathemas, has for
gotten to denounce cruelty, hypocrisy, and
corruption, which were flagrant in her
very bosom. Blame given to the blame
less makes us very often most lenient to
Second Lecture. 93
the blameworthy. Insincerity (whether it
profess to hold what we think is false or
what we think is true), cant, selfishness,
deception of one s self or of other people,
cruelty, prejudice, these are the things
with which the Church ought to be a great
deal more angry than she is. The anger
which she is ready to expend upon the
misbeliever ought to be poured out on
these.
And, again, when the denouncing of
penalties on wrong belief shall be done
with, then the calm portrayal of the con
sequences of wrong belief shall have a
better chance. To tell an honest un-
believer that God will punish him for not
believing that which his mind can see no
sufficient reason for accepting, that, if
he is a real man, only fixes him more
certainly in unbelief. To point out to
him how his unbelief is shutting him out
of great regions of joy and growth, and
robbing his nature and separating him
from God, that is legitimate enough.
94 Tolerance.
It cannot make him believe, only posi
tive evidence ought to do that, but it
can set him to a more serious examination
of evidence, and take away from the truth
that air of unlikelihood which is the atmos
phere in which so many of the wanderers
go astray.
In all our thinking and speaking we are
to stand guard over the purity of ideas.
And the wrong use, the wrong application,
of an idea violates and vitiates its purity;
so that when it comes back to its true
application, it works feebly or works
falsely. It is as if you whittled your fire
wood with the surgeon s knife; when the
next delicate operation comes, the fine
ness and the sharpness are not there.
You love an unlovely nature, and your
very power of love grows coarse; when
the true loveliness stands up before you,
your love is coarse and lustful. You ad
mire baseness, and you have nothing but
a debased admiration to give to nobleness.
You hate a troublesome truth, and it is
Second Lecture. 95
only a weak and peevish dislike, not a
generous indignation, which you have to
bestow upon a flagrant lie. Like precious
essences whose strength lies in their purity,
are these capacities of strong emotion
which make the worth and vigor of a
human life.
Stand guard, then, over your moral
condemnation ; do not let it go out
against honest error. If you do, it will
come back to you with its finest fire chilled
and cooled, with its eager impetuosity
hesitating and half palsied, with its reality
dimmed and confused. Keep it till you
meet a bad man, a false man, a cruel man.
Then, just because you have not flung it
out loose on all the errors which you dis
approved, but on which by its very nature
it could take no hold, it will spring at the
throat of the wickedness which by its very
nature it was made to hate and is bound
to try to kill wherever it can find it.
How quickly one discovers as one goes
about in the strange, windy world of
p6 Tolerance.
protestants, reformers, radicals, philan
thropists, and denouncers of the world s
innumerable wrongs, which are the few
among the multitude who have kept their
power of moral condemnation pure by
using it only at the right times and on
the right material. How they shine like
clear stars in the midst of the lurid light
of all the rest !
4. It is a truth which is essential to what I
have been saying, and one which for its own
great value cannot too often be repeated,
that the Christian faith is set on moral
ends and can find a satisfaction with which
it can be wholly satisfied only in human
character. This is a truth which affects
most fundamentally the priesthood of the
Christian minister. The purpose of the
Christian faith is man. Man is the end,
truth is the means. It is the place of
Christianity to take up the purposes of
God and keep the proportions of His
ways and standards. Christianity, then,
must hold man as her purpose, truth as
Second Lecture. 97
the means by which that purpose may be
reached; character always behind belief,
belief always as the gateway and vestibule
to character.
Now, the priest is the expression and
embodiment of Christianity; what the
Christian faith is in its great impersonal
abstractness, that he is in his active per
sonality. He is the keeper of the things
of God. And of what things? Of truth,
no doubt. He is to find by every most
persistent search, to keep with sleepless
care the truth of God. If there is any
truth of God hidden in history or in the
methods of interpretation of the Sacred
Book, it is the priest s duty to go and find
it with the fearless search of consecrated
reason. Alas for him if he leave that
work to be done by unconsecrated and
perhaps by hostile hands ! The keeper of
the truth of God, the priest is certainly;
but always for its purposes, always for
men. As God s great purpose on the
earth is man, not truth ; as He will freely
9# Tolerance.
let His truth be misunderstood, and wait in
perfect patience for the time when it can
free itself from misconceptions and come
out clear and sure, but will never let any
one of His children be put in a place where
he must necessarily do wrong, so (and it
is the first truth of his ministry) the pri
mary and final care of the true priest of
God is human character; and truth is in
his hands, not for its own value, but as an
instrument for that.
You, my friends, will be before many
years called to be priests in the Church of
God. With an ordination which you can
even now feel hovering over your heads,
you will find yourselves set apart to the
sacredest and most delightful life which
men can live. How shall you account of
yourselves? how shall you ask men to
account of you there? Paul says, " As
ministers of Christ and stewards of the
mysteries of God." A steward keeps his
treasures for their uses. He is no miser
or connoisseur, keeping his mysteries for
Second Lecture. 99
their own preciousness or curious beauty.
The steward of the mysteries of God keeps
truth for men ; and back of his keeping of
truth he keeps men, he keeps human char
acter, he keeps the true qualities of the
best humanity in the men committed to
his charge, so that those qualities may not
be lost or corrupted.
May this be your priesthood ! May you
count yourselves the keepers of truth ; but
may you count yourselves still more the
keepers of truthfulness ! May you dread
a stain of error on the truth your people
hold ; but may you dread vastly more the
stain of insincerity or self-deception in
the way in which they hold any truth,
however true ! Great is the power of the
priest who thus stands guard over the hu
manity of his people, and will not, if he
can prevent it, let the most well-meaning
adversary do it harm or dishonor. He
has the most sacred of all the mysteries of
God in charge ; for a life is a more sacred
mystery than any truth, and truth exists
wo Tolerance.
in the world but for the sake of human
lives.
It is not strange in this world to see
ends sacrificed to means ; but it is no less
sad because in history it has grown so
familiar. I remember a curious illustra
tion of it which I heard some years ago in
England. It seems that in Westminster
Abbey a good many Roman Catholics
have been in the habit of coming, on the
day of his sainthood, to pray beside the
tomb of Edward the Confessor at the old
shrine where petitions of devout pilgrims
were offered up for centuries. The late
Dean Stanley loved the custom ; it pleased
his catholicity and his historic sense, and
he gave it all encouragement. But it
seems that it did not so well please one of
the old vergers or sextons of the Abbey;
and one day when the worshippers were
numerous, this venerable official came to
one of them, and touching him on the
shoulder as he knelt upon the ground,
said: " You must go away from here."
Second Lecture. 101
The man meekly looked up and replied :
11 Why? I am doing no harm." " No mat
ter, you must go away," reiterated the
verger. "But why?" persisted the wor
shipper, still on his knees. " I am doing
no harm; I am only praying." But the
verger persevered, and gave his most con
clusive reason. " No matter, I tell you
you must go away; this thing must stop.
If this goes on we shall have people pray
ing all over the Abbey ! " There is a sort
of verger Churchman, more sexton than
priest of the house of God, who is always
for stopping free inquiry, because if this
thing goes on we shall have men seeking
for truth all over the Church of Christ.
The true priest knows that that is what
the Church of Christ is for, and welcomes
it; not merely for the truth which the
search will bring to the light, but for the
searcher s sake, he welcomes it. There
lies the real necessity that the priest
should be above all other things a man
with an intense and live humanity, thor-
IO2 Tolerance.
oughly in sympathy with all that is best
and bravest and most vital in his fellow-
men. We all know how about the figure
of the priest in many of the centuries of
Christian history there has hung an air of
mystery and inhumanity. Men, women,
and priests have seemed to make up the
human race. The priest was separate from
all his fellow-men. He was the repository
of knowledge which nobody but himself
could understand. He lived by laws
which were different from those by which
other men must live. He ate strange
food, and wore strange clothes, and talked
in strange tones, and had power with men
because he was different from them. If
that was ever good, the day for it is past.
The priest to-day must stand in the centre
of all the four horizons and be the most
manly of all men. What it is good for
all men to be, he must be supremely ;
what he is supremely, it must be good for
all other men to be. He must have the
widest sympathy, and preach by word
Second Lecture. 103
and life the broadest tolerance of all
honest opinion, however various, however
wrong. He must be the champion of
the right of the most mistaken soul to
hold and teach his opinion until he has
become convinced that it is untrue; and
at the same time he must be the pattern of
intolerance upon the moral side, and have
no patience with any sin, however respect
able or useful. It is the fundamental con
ception of Christianity as a religion of
character, and not of dogma, save as a
means to character, which makes necessary
and makes possible a priesthood such as
this.
I have not left myself the space in
which to speak as I intended of the de
tailed methods and means by which the
minister of Christ may cultivate the
broad and positive tolerance which I
have praised in your hearing during these
two lectures. But not to leave that sub
ject totally untouched, I must say a few
words about that power to which many
IO4 Tolerance.
people in these days are looking as the
force which is to bring the most discord
ant thinkers into sympathy with one
another. I mean the power of practical
work. We all know how the Church in
all its branches has wakened from its
lethargy and become aware of the misery
and sin of which the world is full, and
undertaken, with an energy which was
not known a few years ago, to do its duty.
It is an inspiring sight; and one of the
things which is most beautiful about it is
no doubt the way in which it unites in
practical benevolence men who are very
far apart in their ways of thinking and
believing. The Quaker and the Roman
ist may stoop together to lift the drunk
ard from the gutter. The Churchman
and the Agnostic may struggle side by
side against the pestilence of the grog
shop and the filth of the tenement-house.
Nay, more ; men who are utterly at vari
ance about great points of theology may
plead with the same sinful and stricken
Second Lecture. 105
soul that it shall know the first great
truths of the love of Christ and the wait
ing power of the Holy Spirit. All this is
very good and noble. We rejoice in it
with all our hearts. And just because we
do rejoice in it, we want to be very clear
about just what it is worth, and just what
its limitations and its dangers are ; for one
of the greatest dangers to the purity and
efficiency of any force is that it should be
thought worth more than it is, and ex
pected to do work for which it was not
made. By and by men are sure to be
found at the other extreme, thinking of
the exaggerated force far less than it
deserves.
The defect of Christian work as a means
of Christian tolerance lies in its tendency
to superficialness. I shall not be thought
hostile or indifferent to the great bustle
and glow of activity which fills our
Church s life to-day if I remind you, who
in a year or two will be in the very thick
of it, that it must be backed and sup-
io6 Tolerance.
ported by thought and study and ideas,
or it becomes very thin indeed. One
must sometimes fear lest machineries
should take the place of truths, and lest
the necessity for instant action should
crowd out the possibility of earnest
thought in a Church so pressed upon by
need and so aware of duty as, God be
thanked ! our Church is to-day. But men
must think; and the meeting of men with
men, of souls with souls, must ultimately
be upon the broad and open ground of
thought. And unless I can do more than
simply forget for a time my differences
from my brother thinker, while we both
stop our thinking in order to set some
moral evil right; unless I can, clearly
facing the fact of our difference, welcome
it, honor the spirit of his thought, seek
for enlightenment on my own thought
from his, and not dream of even wishing
to silence or to change his thought
except by reason, unless I gain by
my fellow-work with him that precious
Second Lecture. 107
harmony between personal conviction and
cordial sympathy, I am not growing tol
erant. Tolerance does not mean the
forgetting of differences, but the clear
recognition of them and the hearty ac
ceptance and use of them.
It is possible for the fellowship of work
to help us to all that; and when it does
so, it is good indeed. It must not sac
rifice personal conviction to immediate
efficiency. It must take those who join
in doing it deep down into that under
world where personal convictions find
the everlasting principles of which they
are the individual expressions. It must
invade and not evade the world of
thought. It must reach and live in the
unity which lies below, and not the unity
which lies above, the puzzling questions
of the soul. So only is its work thorough
and permanent. So only does work bring
tolerance. So only do the mission and
the hospital and the parish machinery,
the men s clubs and the mother s meet-
loS Tolerance.
ings, become good for the soul. Such
power may work have with you, my
friends, forever enlarging and opening
your deepest lives.
Thus I have tried in these two lectures
to speak of the nature, the methods, and
the prospects of tolerance. If I have at
all succeeded in what I have undertaken
to do, one conviction, of which I just
spoke as I closed the other evening,
must have grown stronger and stronger
in you as I have spoken. That convic
tion is that tolerance is not a special
quality or attainment of life so much as
it is an utterance of the life itself. Intoler
ance is meagreness of life. He whose
life grows abundant, grows into sympathy
with the lives of fellow-men, as when one
pool among the many on the se a-shore
rocks fills itself full, it overflows and be
comes one with the other pools, making
them also one with each other all over
the broad expanse.
Second Lecture. /op
What then we need is fuller life. There
is no word of Christ more tempting to
any man who craves the largest and
healthiest relations with his fellow-men
than that word which is written in the
tenth chapter of St. John : " I am come
that they might have life, and that they
might have it more abundantly." We
may adjust relations as we will ; we may
decide just how far we can co-operate
with this or that heretic ; \ve may draw
careful distinctions between the various
classes of opinions about which we differ,
labelling some essential, and some non-
essential. It is all surface-work; it is all
uncertain ; it is full of mischief and of
blunders ; it is always joining together
souls which have no sympathy with one
another, and throwing apart souls which
ought to be parts of each other s life.
Only a deeper vitality, a richer filling of
our spirits with the Spirit of God ; an
assurance of the possible divineness of the
human life by an experience of how
no Tolerance.
richly it may be filled with divinity,
only this can make us be to our breth
ren and make them be to us all that
God designed.
My friends, be more afraid of the little
ness than of the largeness of life. Let
that be your rule about your people when
you come to be their minister.
Never let yourself think, and never al
low them to think, that mere intolerance
upon their part, mere bitterness against
those who differ from them or from their
Church, is faith.
Never discourage them from thinking.
If they are thinking wrong, do not try to
stop their thinking, but teach them to
think right.
Never doubt their capacity for the best
faith, the profoundest experience, the lar
gest liberty.
And for yourself, let the same rule be
master. Be more afraid of the littleness
than of the largeness of life. Seek with
study and with prayer for the most clear
Second Lecture. in
and confident convictions ; and when you
have won them, hold them so largely and
vitally that they shall be to you, not the
walls which separate you from your
brethren who have other convictions than
yours, but the medium through which you
enter into understanding of and sympathy
with them, as the ocean, which once was
the barrier between the nations, is now the
highway for their never-resting ships, and
makes the whole world one.
This is true tolerance. Into a deeper
and deeper abundance of that tolerance
may our Master lead all of us whom He
has called to be His ministers !
University Press: John Wilson & Son, Cambridge.
