2.  The second of the church’s chronic infirmities has been orthodoxism.  Perhaps it was the recoil of her unbelief in Christ that sent her over into the intellectual prostration of orthodoxism.

Orthodoxy is defined as correct belief.  But when we ask what is correct belief, orthodoxy answers:  “That which is generally believed to be correct.”  Its demand is, therefore, conformity to 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.