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 OWIVERSITY Of CAUFORIW 
 
 RIVERSiOE
 
 r
 
 TOLERANCE 
 
 QL'aa Htctures 
 
 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
 
 3(^ 
 
 Copyright, 18&7, 
 By E. p. Dutton & Co. 
 
 SHnibtrsifB i^rtsg : 
 John Wilson and Son, Cambridge.
 
 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. y 
 
 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. g 
 
 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."
 
 10 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 hfe, 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. ij 
 
 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 Hke IMontaigne, 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
 
 Ursi Lecture. ly 
 
 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 miore 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 ?urc 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. ig 
 
 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. " Hoiv 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 tlirough. 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
 
 20 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- 
 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 
 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. 2^ 
 
 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 centrahiess 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. 2<y 
 
 little dififerent way when we say that true 
 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 afifec- 
 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 
 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 
 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. 2j 
 
 been true with you, that the more sure you 
 have been, the more tolerant you have 
 been ahvays ? Why is it that we are often 
 so much more ready to tolerate those who 
 dififer 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 ic 
 is not possible, in the short space which 1 
 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 lubjects 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
 
 50 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 
 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. p 
 
 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, w^as 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. 5j 
 
 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 corrupters 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
 
 ^ Tolerance. 
 
 thousand armed enemies were landed in 
 any part of the reahn." But though the 
 theory remained, it was soon evident that 
 another spirit was at work within it. Men 
 of hght stood up here and there, and, full 
 of the belief in positive truth, still pleaded 
 for tolerance. Of all the Reformers, in 
 this 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 1st 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
 
 ^6 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. ^y 
 
 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,
 
 3<5 Tolerance. 
 
 that on the whole, positive belief and 
 tolerance arc 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. ^g 
 
 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
 
 40 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 endeav^or to wash it white." The 
 first book in the controversy is the only 
 valuable one of the scries. 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 
 " 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. 4} 
 
 George 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- 
 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. ^3, 
 
 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 
 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 
 is what our prophet of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury stands up to proclaim with his clear 
 logic and strong style.
 
 4() 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. 4g 
 
 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 
 fcllow-men. 
 
 In all this long lecture I have not till 
 now attempted to give a definition of tole- 
 • ranee. 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
 
 ^o Tolerance. 
 
 for a moment dream of using it. On the 
 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 
 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. 
 There is a moral intolerance which must go 
 with intellectual tolerance to give it vigor.
 
 First Lecture. 5/ 
 
 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. 5^ 
 
 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
 
 5^ 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 He 
 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. ^^ 
 
 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
 
 55 Tolerance. 
 
 earnestness of loyalty to what they know 
 of Him. There is the only unity that 
 is thoroughly worthy cither 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. ^7 
 
 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- 
 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. 6i 
 
 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 yourseh^es 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. 6^ 
 
 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 
 w^hich the tolerant disposition is de- 
 manded ; and wc 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- 
 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 
 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 we 
 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 
 arc 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. 6g 
 
 and found in their experience how good it 
 is that the divine Hght 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. 
 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
 
 yo 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. yi 
 
 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.
 
 y2 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. 75 
 
 fellovv-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 hfe. 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 
 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 
 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
 
 y4 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. y^ 
 
 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
 
 j6 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. yy 
 
 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. jg 
 
 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. 8i 
 
 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, docs 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. 8) 
 
 which he stands. He docs 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. 8^ 
 
 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. 
 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. 8y 
 
 " 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 wc 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. 8g 
 
 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
 
 po 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 wdiat 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. gi 
 
 was on earth some revelation of God's 
 truth so absohitely 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 
 mind, 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. g} 
 
 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.
 
 g4 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 ; w-hen 
 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. g^ 
 
 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
 
 g6 Tolerance. 
 
 protcstants, 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. gy 
 
 the means by which that purpose may be 
 reached ; character ahvays behind behef, 
 behef 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
 
 gS 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. gg 
 
 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 quahties of the 
 best humanity in the men committed to 
 his charge, so that those quahties may not 
 be lost or corrupted. 
 
 May this be your priesthood ! May you 
 count yourseh^es 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 
 lias 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
 
 loo 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 pilgrim.s 
 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. loi 
 
 The man meekly looked up and replied : 
 " 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-
 
 102 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. lo^ 
 
 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
 
 104 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 w'orld 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. lo^ 
 
 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-
 
 io8 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 sea-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. log 
 
 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; we 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
 
 / / o 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. 1 1 1 
 
 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 ycu 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.
 
 DATE DUE 
 
 FEB 
 
 2 3 1972 
 
 
 
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