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Updated: May 24, 2025
As a natural consequence of such a law, the vilest scoundrels in the land set up the trade of informers and heresy-hunters. Wherever a dissenting meeting or burial took place, there was sure to be a mercenary spy, ready to bring a complaint against all in attendance. The Independents and Baptists ceased, in a great measure, to hold public meetings, yet even they did not escape prosecution.
By a curious chance, his landlady, fifty years before, had been a servant in the household of Grotius, and once had locked that great man in a trunk and escorted him, right side up, across the border into Switzerland to escape the heresy-hunters who were looking for human kindling.
All kinds of human feelings deserve our respect, for it is not the body that feels but the soul, and the soul, "being a part of God on high, cannot possibly have an absolutely bad tendency." Men may not be heresy-hunters and fault-finders, for none is free from heresy and faults himself: the face he brings to the mirror, he finds reflected in it.
But protestants were very disproportionately numerous in his diocese; if the accepted principle were sound at all, he of all men was most bound to strictness with the persistently recalcitrant, and that fact of itself sufficed to encourage heresy-hunters.
In one respect, however, if in one only, the arrangement had been unfortunate. Hinc illae lachrymae. For the Religious Newspapers, and Periodical Heresy-hunters, getting very lively in those years, were prompt to seize the cue; and have prosecuted and perhaps still prosecute it, in their sad way, to all lengths and breadths.
It had always been thus, he mused, even in those early half-forgotten days when he was emancipating himself from the Ghetto, and half-shocked admirers no less than heresy-hunters bore to the ears of the Beth-din his dreadful rejection of miracle and ceremony. Poor Saul Morteira!
As a natural consequence of such a law, the vilest scoundrels in the land set up the trade of informers and heresy-hunters. Wherever a dissenting meeting or burial took place, there was sure to be a mercenary spy, ready to bring a complaint against all in attendance. The Independents and Baptists ceased, in a great measure, to hold public meetings, yet even they did not escape prosecution.
One can easily imagine that these heresy-hunters would be much too superior persons to mix with the crowd about the door of Peter's house, and would, as Luke says, be 'sitting by, near enough to see and hear, but far enough to show that they had no share in the vulgar enthusiasm of these provincial peasants.
It is true, he disdained also to take part in the dark doings of the monks, those heresy-hunters of the Roman See; but appears to have seen, not without pleasure, the quarrel, then already rising between the Reformers themselves, touching the doctrine of the Lord's Supper, and used it so, as to decide in favor of no party, read lectures to all, and maintain as long as possible his former superior position over against them.
As to Beecher, nothing could exceed his bold brilliancy. He was a man of genius; even more a poet than an orator; in sympathy with every noble cause; and utterly without fear of the pew-holders inside his church or of the mob outside. Heresy-hunters did not daunt him.
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