o current opinion. It
assumes that essential truth has been sought out, registered and
certified once for all and finally: this you must believe, and you must
believe nothing other or more than this. Of course, then, belief must
be stereotyped and stationary. There can be no growth of doctrine; no
new light can break forth from God's holy word.

"Orthodoxy begins," says Phillips Brooks, "by setting a false standard
of life. It makes men aspire after soundness in the faith rather than
after richness in the truth.... It makes possible an easy transmission
of truth, but only by the deadening of truth, as a butcher freezes meat
in order to carry it across the sea. Orthodoxy discredits and
discourages inquiry, and has made the name of free thinker, which ought
to be a crown and glory, a stigma of disgrace. It puts men in the base
and demoralizing position in which they apologize for seeking new truth.
It is responsible for a large part of the defiant liberalism which not
merely disbelieves the orthodox dogma, but disbelieves it with a sense
of attempted wrong and of triumphant escape. It is orthodoxy and not
truth which has done the persecuting. The inquisitions and dungeons and
social ostracisms for opinion's sake belong to it."[20]

It is evident that when for loyalty to the truth is substituted loyalty
to a prescribed statement of truth, the entire moral order is
subverted. Truth for me is what justifies itself to my reason and
insight; to that my choices must conform; by that my conduct must be
guided. To accept statements to which my judgment does not assent, which
are repugnant to my reason, because others seek to impose them upon me,
is in the highest degree immoral. "Let every man be fully persuaded in
his own mind," is the apostolic maxim.

Every honest man wants to know what is true, and seeks to have his
character and his conduct conform to the truth. But orthodoxy insists
that he shall limit his acceptance to fixed and definite statements
prepared for him by others. Freedom of investigation is denied him. The
limits are set, beyond which his thought must not range. If there is
truth outside of the boundaries of orthodoxy, he must not reach out
after it; if he does, he shall suffer the consequences.

For there always is a penalty for heresy. Those who diverge from the
orthodox standards are always exposed to some measure of censure or
discredit. In former days the stake or the gallows was the penalty. John
Hus