One sort of heresies stands apart from the rest. It is infinitely the
most various sort. It includes all those heresies which result from
wrong-headed mental elaboration, as distinguished from those which are
the result of hasty and imperfect apprehension, the heresies of the
clever rather than the heresies of the obtuse. The former are of endless
variety and complexity; the latter are in comparison natural, simple
confusions. The former are the errors of the study, the latter the
superstitions that spring by the wayside, or are brought down to us in
our social structure out of a barbaric past.

To the heresies of thought and speculation belong the elaborate
doctrine of the Trinity, dogmas about God's absolute qualities, such odd
deductions as the accepted Christian teachings about the virginity of
Mary and Joseph, and the like. All these things are parts of orthodox
Christianity. Yet none of them did Christ, even by the Christian
account, expound or recommend. He treated them as negligible. It was
left for the Alexandrians, for Alexander, for little, red-haired,
busy, wire-pulling Athanasius to find out exactly what their Master was
driving at, three centuries after their Master was dead. . . .

Men still sit at little desks remote from God or life, and rack their
inadequate brains to meet fancied difficulties and state unnecessary
perfections. They seek God by logic, ignoring the marginal error
that creeps into every syllogism. Their conceit blinds them to the
limitations upon their thinking. They weave spider-like webs of muddle
and disputation across the path by which men come to God. It would not
matter very much if it were not that simpler souls are caught in these
webs. Every great religious system in the world is choked by such webs;
each system has its own. Of all the blood-stained tangled heresies which