In such a case the writer is apt to have recourse to epigrams. Somewhere in this world there is an epigram for every dilemma. But upon this particular subject, the Bible and Shakespeare and Izaak Walton and even old Benham leave us in the lurch. Perhaps Jonathan Swift (I quote from memory) came nearest to the problem when he said that most men had just enough religion to hate their neighbors but not quite enough to love them. Unfortunately that bright remark does not quite cover our present difficulty. There have been people possessed of as much religion as any one individual could safely hold who have hated their neighbors as cordially as the best of them. There have been others who were totally devoid of the religious instinct who squandered their affection upon all the stray cats and dogs and human beings of Christendom.
No, I shall have to find an answer of my own. And upon due cogitation (but with a feeling of great uncertainty) I shall now state what I suspect to be the truth.
The men who have fought for tolerance, whatever their differences, had all of them one thing in common; their faith was tempered by doubt; they might honestly believe that they themselves were right, but they never reached the point where that suspicion hardened into an absolute conviction.
In this day and age of super-patriotism, with our enthusiastic clamoring for a hundred-percent this and a hundred-percent that, it may be well to point to the lesson taught by nature which seems to have a constitutional aversion to any such ideal of standardization.
Purely bred cats and dogs are proverbial idiots who are apt to die because no one is present to take them out of the rain. Hundred-percent pure iron has long since been discarded for the composite metal called steel. No jeweler ever undertook to do anything with hundred-percent pure gold or silver. Fiddles, to be any good, must be made of six or seven different varieties of wood. And as for a meal composed entirely of a hundred-percent mush, I thank you, no!
In short, all the most useful things in this world are compounds and I see no reason why faith should be an exception. Unless the base of our “certainty” contains a certain amount of the alloy of “doubt,” our faith will sound as tinkly as a bell made of pure silver or as harsh as a trombone made of brass.
It was a profound appreciation of this fact which set the heroes of tolerance apart from the rest of the world.
As far as personal integrity went, honesty of conviction, unselfish devotion to duty and all the other household virtues, most of these men could have passed muster before a board of Puritan Inquisitors. I would go further than that and state that at least half of them lived and died in such a way that they would now be among the saints, if their peculiar trend of conscience had not forced them to be the open and avowed enemies of that institution which has taken upon itself the exclusive right of elevating ordinary human beings to certain celestial dignities.
But fortunately they were possessed of the divine doubt.
They knew (as the Romans and the Greeks had known before them) that the problem which faced them was so vast that no one in his right senses would ever expect it to be solved. And while they might hope and pray that the road which they had taken would eventually lead them to a safe goal, they could never convince themselves that it was the only right one, that all other roads were wrong and that the enchanting by-paths which delighted the hearts of so many simple people were evil thoroughfares leading to damnation.