e first
essential to salvation is orthodox belief, placed conduct on a lower
plane of importance than dogma, while the conviction that it is in the
power of man to obtain absolute certainty in religious belief, that
erroneous belief is in the eyes of the Almighty a crime bringing with it
eternal damnation, and that the teacher of heresy is the greatest enemy
of mankind, at once justified in the eyes of the believer acts which now
seem the gravest moral aberrations. Many baser motives and elements no
doubt mingled with the long and hideous history of the religious
persecutions of Christendom, but in the eyes of countless conscientious
men this teaching seemed amply sufficient to justify them and to stifle
all feeling of compassion for the victims. Much the same considerations
explain the absolute indifference with which so many good men witnessed
those witch persecutions which consigned thousands of old, feeble and
innocent women to torture and to death.

Other illustrations of a less tragical kind might be given. Thus in
cases of child-birth the physician is sometimes placed in the
alternative of sacrificing the life of the mother or of the unborn
child. In such cases a Protestant or freethinking physician would not
hesitate to save the adult life as by far the most valuable. The
Catholic doctrine is that under such circumstances the first duty of the
physician is to save the life of the unbaptized child.[18] Large numbers
of commercial transactions which are now universally acknowledged to be
perfectly innocent and useful would during a long period have been
prohibited on account of the Catholic doctrine of usury which condemned
as sinful even the most moderate interest on money if it was exacted as
the price of the loan.[19]

Every religious and indeed every philosophical system that has played a
great part in the history of the world has a tendency either to form or
to assimilate with a particular moral type, and in the eyes of a large
and growing number it is upon the excellency of this type, and upon its
success in producing it, that its superiority mainly depends. The
superstructure or scaffolding of belief around which it is formed
appears to them of comparatively little moment, and it is not uncommon
to find men ardently devoted to a particular type long after they have
discarded the tenets with which it was once connected. Carlyle, for
example, sometimes spoke of himself as a Calvinist, and used language
both