craving of their restlessness for peace, their angers against
disorder and their desire for the avenger; their sexual passions and
perplexities. . . .

Each of these great systems of needs and efforts brings its own sort
of sediment into religion. Each, that is to say, has its own kind
of heresy, its distinctive misapprehension of God. It is only in the
synthesis and mutual correction of many divergent ideas that the idea of
God grows clear. The effort to understand completely, for example,
leads to the endless Heresies of Theory. Men trip over the inherent
infirmities of the human mind. But in these days one does not argue
greatly about dogma. Almost every conceivable error about unity, about
personality, about time and quantity and genus and species, about
begetting and beginning and limitation and similarity and every kink
in the difficult mind of man, has been thrust forward in some form of
dogma. Beside the errors of thought are the errors of emotion. Fear and
feebleness go straight to the Heresies that God is Magic or that God
is Providence; restless egotism at leisure and unchallenged by urgent
elementary realities breeds the Heresies of Mysticism, anger and hate
call for God's Judgments, and the stormy emotions of sex gave mankind
the Phallic God. Those who find themselves possessed by the new spirit
in religion, realise very speedily the necessity of clearing the mind
of all these exaggerations, transferences, and overflows of feeling. The
search for divine truth is like gold washing; nothing is of any value
until most has been swept away.



2. HERESIES OF SPECULATION