No sooner was it ready for occupancy, no sooner had a new set of rules and regulations been posted upon the gates, than a wholesale walk-out occurred among the disgruntled trustees. As their keepers, now called ministers, had been deprived of the old methods of discipline (excommunication, torture, execution, confiscation and exile) they were absolutely helpless before this determined mob and were forced to stand by and look on while the rebels put up such a stockade as pleased their own theological preferences and proclaimed such new doctrines as happened to suit their temporary convictions.
This process was repeated so often that finally there developed a sort of spiritual no-man’s-land between the different lockups where curious souls could roam at random and where honest people could think whatever they pleased without hindrance or molestation.
And this is the great service which Protestantism rendered to the cause of tolerance.
It reëstablished the dignity of the individual man.
CHAPTER XIII
ERASMUS
In the writing of every book there occurs a crisis. Sometimes it comes during the first fifty pages. Upon other occasions it does not make itself manifest until the manuscript is almost finished. Indeed, a book without a crisis is like a child that has never had the measles. There probably is something the matter with it.
The crisis in the present volume happened a few minutes ago, for I have now reached the point where the idea of a work upon the subject of tolerance in the year of grace 1925 seems quite preposterous; where all the labor spent thus far upon a preliminary study appears in the light of so much valuable time wasted; where I would like best of all to make a bonfire of Bury and Lecky and Voltaire and Montaigne and White and use the carbon copies of my own work to light the stove.
How to explain this?
There are many reasons. In the first place, there is the inevitable feeling of boredom which overtakes an author when he has been living with his topic on a very intimate footing for too long a time. In the second place, the suspicion that books of this sort will not be of the slightest practical value. And in the third place the fear that the present volume will be merely used as a quarry from which our less tolerant fellow-citizens will dig a few easy facts with which to bolster up their own bad causes.