never ceasing search. But they are merely what he thinks of God--
never anything more. They often contain the highest thought of
which he is capable in his time and place; but the awful mistake
and cruelty of them is that they have regularly been put forth as
the voice of God Himself, authoritative, inviolable, and
unchanging. An assemblage of men have a perfect right to turn a man
out of their church on theological grounds; but they have no right
to do it in the name of God. With as much propriety a man might be
expelled from a political party in the name of God. In the long
life of any one of the great religions of the globe, how many brief
theologies have grown up under it like annual plants under a tree!
How many has the Christian religion itself sprouted, nourished, and
trampled down as dead weeds! What do we think now of the Christian
theology of the tenth century? of the twelfth? of the fifteenth? In
the nineteenth century alone, how many systems of theology have
there been? In the Protestantism of the United States, how many are
there to-day? Think of the names they bear--older and newer!
According to founders, and places, and sources, and contents, and
methods: Arminian--Augustinian--Calvinistic--Lutheran--Gallican--
Genevan--Mercersburg--New England--Oxford--national--revealed--
Catholic--evangelical--fundamental--historical--homiletical--
moral--mystical--pastoral--practical--dogmatic--exegetical--
polemic--rational--systematic. That sounds a little like
Polonius," said David, stopping suddenly, "but there is no humor in
it! One great lesson in the history of them all is not to be
neglected: that through them also runs the great Law of Evolution,
of the widening thoughts of men; so that now, in civilized
countries at least, the churches persecute to the death no longer.
You know what the Egyptian Priesthood would have done with me at my
trial. What the Mediaeval hierarchy would have done. What the