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Is the word to carry with it license to define in detail an invisible world, and to authorize and excommunicate those whose trust is different? . . Our faculties of belief were not given us to make orthodoxies and heresies withal; they were given us to live by.
As regards Hippolytus I have counted above fifty references to St. Matthew and forty to St. John, in his work on the "Refutation of Heresies," and "Fragments." I append in a note a passage taken from his comment on the Second Psalm, preserved to us by Theodoret. The reader will be able to judge from it from what sources he derived his knowledge of Christ.
"Notwithstanding that the man in full assembly of the States of Holland," said the Ambassador with headlong and confused rhetoric, "had found the means to palliate and plaster the dung of his heresies, and thus to dazzle the eyes of good people," yet it was necessary to protest most vigorously against such an appointment, and to advise that "his works should be publicly burned in the open places of all the cities."
The later work was free from all apparent heresies, yet perhaps it did more towards the establishment of the Copernican doctrine, through the teaching of correct mechanical principles, than the other work had accomplished by a more direct method.
"The music in the Cathedral may have been my fancy," he said, "But the discord in the world sounds clear and is NOT imagination. A casuist in religion may say 'It was to be'; that heresies and dissensions were prophesied by Christ, when He said 'Because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall grow cold'; but this does not excuse the Church from the sin of neglect, if any neglects exists.
The Bible has nothing, is nothing, but laws and lessons, aiming at the illumination, the sanctification, the moral and spiritual perfection of mankind. Idleness and selfishness are the greatest of all heresies, and love and beneficence the perfection of all religion.
If a sort of intellectual inquisition had been established, for the definition and differentiation of heresies, it would have been found that the original republican orthodoxy had suffered more and more from secessions, schisms, and backslidings.
That is why we repeat that the one real danger religion has to face to-day is the danger arising from the spread of a false philosophy, whose tenets are ultimately incompatible with Christian morals. The worst heresies are moral heresies; and of the views we have been discussing we say roundly that their falseness is sufficiently proved by their ethical implications.
A very great killing: of all those who advised that fool of a Firkked to start this business; of those who gave shelter to the false prophet, Rakkeed, when he was here; of the faithless priests who gave ear to his abominable heresies and allowed him to spew out his blasphemies in the temples; of those who sent spies to Krink, to corrupt and pervert my soldiers and nobles; of those who...."
Meanwhile, on all sides everywhere, heresies were teeming, austere and equivocal, pure and unclean according to individuals, but all of them anarchical, and therefore destructive at a moment when, above all, order and discipline were wanted.
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