TRUE LESSON OF PROTESTANTISM 



the present age is simply the further develop- 

 ment of the same protest in behalf of individual 

 responsibility for opinion. And to those who 

 take any interest in the present discussion, I 

 hardly need argue that any revival of the methods 

 of Catholicism could never occur, except as the 

 concomitant of a wholly improbable retrogres- 

 sion of society toward the barbaric type. The 

 very conception of an infallible church is so 

 clearly a survival from primitive religious ideas, 

 that to imagine such an institution presiding 

 over the society of the future involves a most 

 grotesque anachronism. Nevertheless, the uses 

 of the Catholic Church are such that it is likely 

 still to survive for a very long time, though 

 with diminishing influence; and as it affords 

 a refuge for such earnest and thoughtful souls 

 as find the atmosphere of free discussion too 

 bracing, it will probably long continue to re- 

 ceive accessions from the ranks of the various 

 Protestant orthodoxies that are now so rapidly 

 disintegrating. 



With the fading away of the old notion of 

 corporate responsibility for opinion, the value at- 

 tached to unity of belief has greatly diminished, 

 and attempts to secure such unity by violent 

 means have become generally discredited. It is 

 at last beginning to be apprehended that if unity 

 of belief is to have any real value, it can only be 

 when it is the result of the free working of difFer- 

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