Tolerance... Part 3.

Sermon: Tolerance

1867

From the book: Discipline and Other Sermons

by Charles Kingsley

The natural man - whether the heathen savage at one end of the scale, or the epicurean man of the world at the other - has no such instinct. He will feel no anger against falsehood, because he has no love for truth; he will be liberal enough, tolerant enough, of all which does not touch his  own self-interest; but that once threatened, he too may join the ranks of the bigots and persecute, not like them in the name of God and truth, but in those of society and order; and so the chief priests and Pontius Pilate may make a common cause.

 And yet the chief priests, with their sense of duty, of truth, and of right, however blundering, concealed, perverted, may be a whole moral heaven higher than Pilate with no sense of aught beyond present expediency. But nevertheless, what have been the consequences to both? That the chief priests have failed as utterly as the Pilates. As God forewarned them, they have rooted up the wheat with the tares; they have made the blood of martyrs the seed of the Church; and more, they have made martyrs of those who never deserved to be martyrs, by wholesale and indiscriminate condemnation.

They have forgotten that the wheat and tares grow together, not merely in separate men, but in each man's own heart and thoughts; that light and darkness, wisdom and folly, duty and ambition, self-sacrifice and self-conceit, are fighting in every soul of man in whom there is even a germ of spiritual life.

Therefore, they have made men offenders for a word. They have despised noble aspirations, ignored deep and sound insights, because they came in questionable shapes, mingled with errors or eccentricities. They have cried in their haste, "Here are the tares, and the tares alone."

Again and again have religious men done this, for many a hundred years; and again and again the Nemesis has fallen on them. a generation or two has passed, and the world has revolted from their unjust judgments. It has perceived, among the evil, good which it had overlooked in an indignant haste and passion, learned from those who should have taught it wisdom, patience, and charity. It has made heroes of those who had been branded as heretics; and has cried, "There was wheat, and wheat alone." To be continued...