Heresy

“ The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think what we like and say what we think.
—Think what we like!—said the divinity-student;—think what we like! What! against all human and divine authority?
Against all human versions of its own or any other authority. At our own peril always, if we do not like the right,—but not at the risk of being hanged and quartered for political heresy, or broiled on green fagots for ecclesiastical treason! Nay, we have got so far, that the very word heresy has fallen into comparative disuse among us. ”

“ HERETICS AND HERESIES. Liberty, a Word without which all other Words are Vain.
WHOEVER has an opinion of his own, and honestly expresses it, will be guilty of heresy. Heresy is what the minority believe; it is the name given by the powerful to the doctrine of the weak. This word was born of the hatred, arrogance and cruelty of those who love their enemies, and who, when smitten on one cheek, turn the other. ”

“ The heresies arose one after another, from the action of men who were prepared to define yet more punctiliously what the truth might be, and to claim with yet more particular insistence the possession of living tradition and the right to be regarded as the centre of unity. No heresy pretended that the truth was vague and indefinite. The whole gist and meaning of a heresy was that it, the heresy, or he, the heresiarch, was prepared to make doctrine yet more sharp, and to assert his own definition. ”

“ Thus, nearly two hundred years ago, was the significance of heresy understood, and yet this conception continues to exist until the present time. Nor can it fail to exist, so long as there is a concept of the church. Heresy is the reverse of the church. Where there is the church, there is also heresy. The church is an assembly of men asserting that they are in possession of the indisputable truth. ”

“ Why is it that society is so severe on heresy? Three hundred years ago it burned heretics, till thirty years ago it sent them to jail; even in England and America to-day it is content to harass, annoy, and slander them. ”

“ And, to say truth, what heresy hath ever burst forth, but under the name of some certain man, in some certain place, and at some certain time? Who ever set up any heresy, but first divided himself from the consent of the universality and antiquity of the Catholic Church? Which to be true, examples do plainly prove. ”

“ Perhaps the knowledge that the cardinal had set himself to the task of nipping in the bud the dangerous growth of incipient heresy alarmed some of the more timid spirits; whilst others sought for truth and light as it was to be found amongst their recognized preachers and teachers, and were often surprised at the depth of spirituality and earnestness which they found in men who were stanch to the core to the traditions of the church, and held in abhorrence the very name and thought of heresy. ”

“ Can there be anything reasonable in the turpitude of heresy?
Then he hurried to find the Bishop:
—I have emptied our young man's bag, he said to him. Do you know,
Monseigneur, what there was at the bottom?
—Oh, oh. Has he been inclined to debauchery? He is so young.
—Would to heaven it were only that, Monseigneur. But it is a hundred times worse.
—What do you tell me? Must I fear then for all my little sheep? We must look after him then.
—I repeat, Monseigneur, that that would be nothing.... It is the abomination of abomination, a whole world of turpitude, heresies in embryo. ”

“ Then, that we should match [19] each heresy with a particular opinion so as to show how the protagonist of the heresy, meeting with these schemes, gained advantage by seizing their principles and being driven on from them to worse things constructed his own system. ”

“ Wherefore, not being willing that thou shouldst infect the Lord’s flock with thine heresy, we have cast thee out from the Church as an obstinate, impenitent sinner, and have left thee to the judgment of the secular power, by whom thou hast been justly condemned to perish by fire. The punishment is inflicted upon thee for the salvation of thine own soul, and as a step towards the extirpation of heresy. ”

“ Thrust the heretics out of the Church—that is to say, throw away your brains,—put out your eyes. The infidels will thank you. They are willing to adopt your exiles. Every deserter from your camp is a recruit for the army of progress. Cling to the ignorant dogmas of the past; read the 109th Psalm; gloat over the slaughter of mothers and babes; thank God for total depravity; shower your honors upon hypocrites, and silence every minister who is touched with that heresy called genius. ”

“ Any man may fall into error, with regard to one or another doctrine of the Church, against his own will, out of simplicity, or from want of instruction, or because he has received wrong instruction. Such an error of the understanding is called 'material heresy'; but proper heresy, which is called 'formal heresy,' has its seat in the will. ”

“ Now heresy means a dividing or choosing, and almost all of the gravest errors have arisen from adopting some extreme statement of Scripture to the rejection of the other extreme. If we regard the doctrine of sinless perfection as a heresy, we regard contentment with sinful imperfection as a greater heresy. ”

“ Heresy is an aping of the true doctrine and the ministries of the Gospel, and as a monkey has all of the members of a human being and in all things imitates him, so heresy has all the rites of the church and yet is not of the church. ”

“ Yet as heresy multiplied and its obstinacy seemed to justify the passionate hatred which it excited, the churchman might well feel himself unable to endure the thought that the bones of heretics polluted the sacred precincts of church and cemetery, and that unconsciously he was including them in his prayers for the dead. ”

“ The word heretic ought to be a term of honour; for honest, clearly uttered heresy is always virtuous, and this whether truth or error; yet it is not difficult to understand how the charge of heresy has been generally used as a means of exciting bad feeling. ”

“ The only definition of heresy (the word ἁίρεσις means part) is the name given by an assembly of men to every judgment which rejects part of the teaching, as professed by the assembly. A more particular meaning, which more frequently than any other is ascribed to heresy, is that of an opinion which rejects the church doctrine, as established and supported by the worldly power. ”

“ Several of these protests are on record, but they were overruled, and the magistrates did their duty. Under the teaching of the Church the best{48} men of the time regarded heresy as a manifest crime and the burning of heretics as an act of righteousness. ”

“ However strange this may seem to us, reared as we have been in the false doctrine of the Church, as if it were a Christian institution, and taught to despise heresy, it is nevertheless in that which men call heresy that true progress, that is, true Christianity, was manifested, and it only ceased to be such when these heresies were checked, and it was, so to speak, stamped with the immutable imprint of the Church. ”

“ A right understanding of heresies and an appreciation of any truth which they might contain was utterly impossible to men who looked upon heresy as the work of the devil, and all heretics as his chosen tools. ”

“ From the emperor to the meanest peasant the duty of persecution was enforced with all the sanctions, spiritual and temporal, which the Church could command. Not only must the ruler enact rigorous laws to punish heretics, but he and his subjects must see them strenuously executed, for any slackness of persectution was, in the canon law, construed as fautorship of heresy, putting a man on his purgation. ”

“ And the heretical and sceptical world—the "outside barbarians"—with a contemptuous leer, gape at the queer spectacle of the "Vicegerent on Earth" of an all-powerful God being obliged so easily to succumb to heresy—to a little temporal power. ”

“ If we prove that our Church cannot do her work under the charge of heresy, surely it is well. No doubt all this is full of dismay and sorrow; but any thing is better than to be easy in or under heresy. ”

“ First, because I see that heretics and evil livers hold the Society in far greater detestation than they do any other Religious Order; from which I judge that it has the Spirit of God in an especial degree, which the spirit of the devil cannot endure, and that it has been ordained by God to [pg cxxviii] destroy heresy, and wage war against sin in general. ”

“ In addition to the oath—referred to in a previous chapter—prescribed to every ruler, to assist the Church in persecuting heresy, all archbishops and bishops were ordered, either personally or by their archdeacons or other fitting persons, once or twice a year to visit every parish where there was suspicion of heresy, and compel two or three men of good character, or the whole vicinage if necessary, to swear to reveal any reputed heretic, or any person holding secret conventicles, or in any way differing in mode of life from the faithful in general. ”

“ This being settled, it follows, first, that heresy is a separation made in ecclesiastical communion between men of the same religion for some opinions no way contained in the rule itself; and, secondly, that amongst those who acknowledge nothing but the Holy Scriptures to be their rule of faith, heresy is a separation made in their Christian communion for opinions not contained in the express words of Scripture. ”

“ It is not necessary to heresy that the person shall, as a heresiarch, found a new sect, or that, by free choice, he shall go over to a sect condemned by the Church; but heresy is already present whenever any one in the bosom of the Catholic Church departs from only one single point of the faith, or understands one single passage of Holy Scripture otherwise than as the Church, with the assistance of the Holy Ghost, expounds them. ”

“ Eighteenth century heresy is especially noticeable for its immediate connection with political change. For the first time in European history, the great mass commenced to yearn for the assertion in government of democratic principles. ”

“ Heresy is the opinion of people who do not recognize the indisputableness of the church truth.
Heresy is a manifestation of motion in the church, an attempt at destroying the ossified assertion of the church, an attempt at a living comprehension of the teaching. Every step of moving forward, of comprehending and fulfilling the teaching has been accomplished by the heretics: [71] such heretics were Tertullian, and Origen, and Augustine, and Luther, and Huss, and Savonarola, and Chelcický, and others. ”

“ Accordingly, either after abjuring he will hold heresy or error—or before doing so, he will be proved to have held what he abjures. Therefore, understand that in their letters they judge you to be heretics and demand that you abjure the heresy which they suppose you to hold. From this it is evident that a son or friend of yours, if he abjure, can be disgraced for having consorted with a heretical father or friend. Further, it is evident that any other person can rightly say to any one who abjures, “You abjured the heresy which you held and you are not worthy of me.” ”

“ Yet such is the strength of the biological force of variation that even in religion there was chronic heresy. We have seen, in tracing the history of western belief in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, how a strenuous anti-clerical heresy, the Paulician, had arisen and thriven in the East, defying the bloodiest persecution, and developing in the old fashion into a force of hostility to the empire. ”

“ No oath of secrecy, therefore, was binding in a matter of heresy, for if one is faithful to a heretic he is unfaithful to{229} God. Apostasy from the faith is the greatest of all sins, says Bishop Lucas of Tuy; therefore if any one has bound himself by oath to keep the secret of such inexplicable wickedness, he must reveal the heresy and perform penance for the perjury, with the comfortable assurance that, as charity covereth a multitude of sins, he will be gently dealt with in consideration of his zeal. ”

“ The Christian religion, as it addresses and adapts itself to all mankind, bears towards the varieties of national character a relation of which there was no example in the religions of antiquity, and which heresy repudiates and inevitably seeks to destroy. For heresy, like paganism, is national, and dependent both on the particular disposition of the people and on the government of the State. ”

“ In the page of seventeenth-century history, more names of men, either avowedly heretics, or charged by the orthodox with heresy, or whose labors can be shown to have tended to the growth of heresy, may probably be recorded than can be found during the whole of the previously long period during which the Christian Church assumed to dominate and control European thought. The seventeenth-century muster-roll of heresy is indeed a grand one, and gloriously filled. ”

“ Seeing the question will arise, Whether that is a heresy which the magistrate saith is so? and seeing it is both possible, and confessed by all to have often fallen out, that some magistrates have judged that heresy which was not, punishing men accordingly for truth, instead of error; there can be no argument drawn from the obviousness or evidence of heresy, unless we should conclude heresy could never be mistaken for truth, nor truth for heresy; whereof experience shows daily the contrary, even among Christians. ”

“ Item where they desire some reasonable declaration may be made to your people, how they may, if they will, avoid the peril of heresy. No better declaration, we say, can be made than is already by our Saviour Christ, the Apostles, and the determination of the church, which if they keep, they shall not fail to eschew heresy. ”