In religion, however, we are, apparently, for the most part afraid to permit in ourselves this development from tolerance into bigotry. The very same man who is a healthy bigot, on sex-relationship, politics, economics, and what not else, imagines that in religion he is bound, if he would be in accord with the Zeitgeist, to be tolerant of all kinds and shades of religious belief or disbelief. Of course, part of this attitude is due to the impression, not now so prevalent as once it was, that certain truth is truth demonstrable physically, and that religion, which is incapable of such demonstration, is a thing in which uncertainty is inevitable. (Of course such an assumption is quite unscientific.) The main reason for it, however, is the unthinking or superficially thinking assumption that mankind has developed religiously from intolerance into tolerance, and that tolerance, complete, unquestioned, is the highest point yet reached in the development of religion. Students of the history of religion know that this is not so. They know that there have always been successive waves of tolerance and intolerance in religion, as in every other realm of human thought, and that religion has evolved out of tolerance into intolerance just as often, and as rightly, as the other way about. Most of us, however, know nothing of this. The result of this mistake of ours is that the return or progression toward constructive intolerance manifested in every other line of thought to-day is almost entirely absent from modern religious thinking.
One can see this in the very popular campaigns on foot making for what is called ’Church Unity.' Everywhere in Christendom one hears nowadays such cries as this: ‘Let us all get together. Let us forget the things which divide us, and think only of that which unites us.’ What it is that unites us, one notices, is never defined. ‘Let the Baptists and the Methodists and the Episcopalians and the Lutherans and the Roman Catholics and the Unitarians and all the others simply agree to love one another, and forget their differences.' We see many sorts of ministers, in their desire to promote what they believe to be the unity desired by their Master, Christ, exchanging pulpits with one another and passing genial compliments about one another’s superlative worth. There is a tremendous deal of good feeling and every one is very happy; and behold, the millennial unity of all men, for which Christ prayed on the night of his betrayal, is at hand!
Is it? If this was the sort of thing Christ wanted, why did He not practice this modern, tolerant method when He was on earth? Why did He not seek to conciliate, on a basis of mutual toleration, the Sadducees and Pharisees, for instance, instead of denouncing them both for differing from his own conception of religion? Why did He preach things so definite as to alienate most of the people whom He came to earth to save? Why did He die? Apparently it was because He uttered such definite and positive teaching as to force, by his very intolerance, the reflex intolerance of those opposed to that teaching. It is apparent to anyone who reads the Gospels, that Christ stood for definiteness in religion, that He himself died rather than tolerate the religious ideas of most of his contemporaries, and that He earnestly urged his followers to imitate the steadfastness of his example. He prayed, it is true, that all the world might become united; but He must have meant united on the positive and definite platform on which He himself stood. Any other interpretation would stultify, not merely his words, but his whole life.
One hears constantly that people are not interested to-day in systems of religion which are not all-inclusive, which are in any way divisive. If that be true, it is a sad period for religion or for thought in general, that lies before us. To prohibit men from attempting to lift themselves up toward the realities of eternity, to compel them to abandon the mighty gropings which have ever characterized the seers, — intolerant because they were seers and not politicians, — and to substitute for these a unified ‘religion’ consisting of platitudes about being good to one’s grandmother and similar banalities, — to do this would be a dire calamity to the generation and to the race. Ah, no; better the bitter intolerance of those who believe too much and too strongly than the easy complaisance of those who believe too little and hold that little too lightly. Better the Inquisition and the rack than the drugging of those who else might seek for God. Better that we live and die slaves to a half-truth, or a millionth-truth, than that we refuse to look for truth at all. Better even that in religion a man should live and die believing with all his soul in a lie, than that he should merely exist, believing in nothing.