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 Huss and Michael Servetus, Ridley, Latimer, and Cranmer were put to death on the demand of orthodoxy.  It was not because they were not lovers and seekers of truth; it was because they declined to assent to the statements which authority sought to impose on them.  Orthodoxy has found a great variety of methods of enforcing its demand; in recent times it does not often resort to physical coercion, but it never fails to use some kind of pressure.  Those to whom orthodoxy is dearer than truth have ways of their own, even now, of making uncomfortable those to whom truth is dearer than orthodoxy.  Thus it is that the progress of truth has been greatly impeded.  “Ye shall know the truth,” said Jesus, “and the truth shall make you free.”  “Ye shall know,” says orthodoxism, “only the truth that has been prescribed and ticketed by authority; ye shall be taught what is orthodox, and orthodoxy shall keep you safe and sound.”  The entire attitude of the mind is changed, under this demand.  It is no longer that of free inquiry, of open-minded search for truth; it is that of passive assent, of unreasoned submission to authority.

Just to the extent to which orthodoxism succeeds in forcing its demand is progress rendered impossible.  There have always been brave men to whom truth was dearer than orthodoxy, and to them we owe all the gains the church has made.  “The lower orders of the church’s workers, the mere runners of her machinery,” says Bishop Brooks, “have always been strictly and scrupulously orthodox; while all the church’s noblest servants, they who have opened to her new heavens of vision and new domains of work,—­Paul, Origen, Tertullian, Dante, Abelard, Luther, Milton, Coleridge, Maurice, Swedenborg, Martineau,—­have again and again been persecuted for being what they truly were—­unorthodox."[21]

The temper of coercion, physical or moral, which is an essential element in orthodoxism, always produces, in those who do not submit to it, the temper of resentment and rebellion, which largely characterizes what is known as liberalism.  Those who are thus flung off into opposition are in no mood to examine fairly the truth that there is in orthodoxy.  Their mental attitude is apt to be quite as unfavorable to the discovery of the truth as that of the other party.  Between those who affirm, with the threat of the withdrawal of fellowship, and those who deny, with the sense of injury and oppression, the truth has a poor chance for itself in this world.  The enfeeblement of the church, in all the generations, has been largely due to this cause.

What orthodoxism produces when it has free course and is glorified, may be seen in the Greek church.  More than any other branch of the Christian church the Greek church has put the emphasis upon orthodoxy.  The natural and inevitable result has been that that church has destroyed itself and the nation whose life it has dominated and blighted.  It is the Greek church that has led Russia to its doom.  And it is orthodoxism that has made the Greek church a blind leader of the blind, and has plunged nation and church into the ditch together.