Therefore they have made men offenders for a word.
They have despised noble aspirations, ignored deep and sound
insights, because they came in questionable shapes, mingled with
errors or eccentricities. They have cried in their haste, 'Here are
tares, and tares alone.'
Again and again have religious men done this, for many a hundred
years; and again and again the Nemesis has fallen on them. A
generation or two has passed, and the world has revolted from their
unjust judgments. It has perceived, among the evil, good which it
had overlooked in an indignant haste and passionateness, learnt from
those who should have taught it wisdom, patience, and charity. It
has made heroes of those who had been branded as heretics; and has
cried, 'There was wheat, and wheat alone;' and so religious men have
hindered the very cause for which they fancied that they were
fighting; and have gained nothing by disobeying God's command, save
to weaken their own moral influence, to increase the divisions of the
Church, and to put a fresh stumbling-block in the path of the
ignorant and the young.
And what have been the consequences to Christ's Church? Have not her
enemies--and her friends too--for centuries past, cried in vain:-
'For forms of faith let graceless zealots fight,
His can't he wrong, whose life is in the right.
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