344 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



as they are not contravened directly enough to suggest disobedience, 

 they may be readily contravened indirectly ; for the reason that there 

 has not been cultivated the habit of contemplating consequences as 

 they work out in remote ways. Hence it happens that social arrange- 

 ments essentially at variance with the ethics of the creed give no of- 

 fence to those who are profoundly offended by whatever seems at vari- 

 ance with its theology. Maintenance of the dogmas and forms of the 

 religion becomes the primary, all-essential thing ; and the secondary 

 thing, often sacrificed, is the securing of those relations among men 

 which, the spirit of the religion requires. How conceptions of good 

 and bad in social affairs are thus warped, the pending controversy 

 about the Athanasian creed shows us. Here we have theologians who 

 believe that our national welfare will be endangered, if there is not in 

 all churches an enforced repetition of the dogmas that Father, Son, 

 and Holy Ghost, are each of them Almighty ; that yet there are not 

 three Almighties, but one Almighty ; that one of the Almighties suf- 

 fered on the cross and descended into hell to pacify another of them ; 

 and that, whoever does not believe this, " without doubt shall perish 

 everlastingly." They say that, if the State makes its priests threaten 

 with eternal torments all who doubt these doctrines, things will go 

 well ; but, if those priests, who, in this threat, perceive the devil-wor- 

 ship of the savage usurping the name of Christianity, are allowed to 

 pass it by in silence, woe to the nation ! Evidently the theological bias 

 leading to such a conviction entirely excludes Sociology, considered as 

 a science. 



Under its special forms, as well as under its general form, the theo- 

 logical bias brings errors into the estimates men make of societies and 

 institutions. Sectarian antipathies, growing out of differences of doc- 

 trine, disable the members of each religious community from fairly 

 judging other religious communities. It is always difficult, and often 

 impossible, for the zealot to conceive that his own religious system and 

 his own zeal on its behalf may have but a relative truth and a relative 

 value ; or to conceive that there may be relative truths and relative 

 values in alien beliefs and the fanaticisms which maintain them. Though 

 the adherent of each creed has continually thrust on his attention the 

 fact that adherents of other creeds are no less confident than he is 

 though he can scarcely fail sometimes to reflect that these adherents 

 of other creeds have, in nearly all cases, simply accepted the dogmas 

 current in the places and families they were born in, and that he has 

 done the like yet the special theological bias which his education and 

 surroundings have given him, makes it almost beyond imagination that 

 these other creeds may, some of them, have justifications as good as, 

 if not better than, his own, and that the rest, along with certain 

 amounts of absolute worth, may have their special fitnesses to the 

 people holding them. 



