2.  Heresies of speculation

One sort of heresies stands apart from the rest.  It is infinitely the most various sort.  It includes all those heresies which result from wrong-headed mental elaboration, as distinguished from those which are the result of hasty and imperfect apprehension, the heresies of the clever rather than the heresies of the obtuse.  The former are of endless variety and complexity; the latter are in comparison natural, simple confusions.  The former are the errors of the study, the latter the superstitions that spring by the wayside, or are brought down to us in our social structure out of a barbaric past.

To the heresies of thought and speculation belong the elaborate doctrine of the Trinity, dogmas about God’s absolute qualities, such odd deductions as the accepted Christian teachings about the virginity of Mary and Joseph, and the like.  All these things are parts of orthodox Christianity.  Yet none of them did Christ, even by the Christian account, expound or recommend.  He treated them as negligible.  It was left for the Alexandrians, for Alexander, for little, red-haired, busy, wire-pulling Athanasius to find out exactly what their Master was driving at, three centuries after their Master was dead. . . .

Men still sit at little desks remote from God or life, and rack their inadequate brains to meet fancied difficulties and state unnecessary perfections.  They seek God by logic, ignoring the marginal error that creeps into every syllogism.  Their conceit blinds them to the limitations upon their thinking.  They weave spider-like webs of muddle and disputation across the path by which men come to God.  It would not matter very much if it were not that simpler souls are caught in these webs.  Every great religious system in the world is choked by such webs; each system has its own.  Of all the blood-stained tangled heresies which make up doctrinal Christianity and imprison the mind of the western world to-day, not one seems to have been known to the nominal founder of Christianity.  Jesus Christ never certainly claimed to be the Messiah; never spoke clearly of the Trinity; was vague upon the scheme of salvation and the significance of his martyrdom.  We are asked to suppose that he left his apostles without instructions, that were necessary to their eternal happiness, that he could give them the Lord’s Prayer but leave them to guess at the all-important Creed,* and that the Church staggered along blindly, putting its foot in and out of damnation, until the “experts” of Nicaea, that “garland of priests,” marshalled by Constantine’s officials, came to its rescue. . . .  From the conversion of Paul onward, the heresies of the intellect multiplied about Christ’s memory and hid him from the sight of men.  We are no longer clear about the doctrine he taught nor about the things he said and did. . . .