s and Michael Servetus, Ridley, Latimer, and Cranmer were put to
death on the demand of orthodoxy. It was not because they were not
lovers and seekers of truth; it was because they declined to assent to
the statements which authority sought to impose on them. Orthodoxy has
found a great variety of methods of enforcing its demand; in recent
times it does not often resort to physical coercion, but it never fails
to use some kind of pressure. Those to whom orthodoxy is dearer than
truth have ways of their own, even now, of making uncomfortable those to
whom truth is dearer than orthodoxy. Thus it is that the progress of
truth has been greatly impeded. "Ye shall know the truth," said Jesus,
"and the truth shall make you free." "Ye shall know," says orthodoxism,
"only the truth that has been prescribed and ticketed by authority; ye
shall be taught what is orthodox, and orthodoxy shall keep you safe and
sound." The entire attitude of the mind is changed, under this demand.
It is no longer that of free inquiry, of open-minded search for truth;
it is that of passive assent, of unreasoned submission to authority.

Just to the extent to which orthodoxism succeeds in forcing its demand
is progress rendered impossible. There have always been brave men to
whom truth was dearer than orthodoxy, and to them we owe all the gains
the church has made. "The lower orders of the church's workers, the mere
runners of her machinery," says Bishop Brooks, "have always been strictly
and scrupulously orthodox; while all the church's noblest servants, they
who have opened to her new heavens of vision and new domains of
work,--Paul, Origen, Tertullian, Dante, Abelard, Luther, Milton,
Coleridge, Maurice, Swedenborg, Martineau,--have again and again been
persecuted for being what they truly were--unorthodox."[21]

The temper of coercion, physical or moral, which is an essential element
in orthodoxism, always produces, in those who do not submit to it, the
temper of resentment and rebellion, which largely characterizes what is
known as liberalism. Those who are thus flung off into opposition are in
no mood to examine fairly the truth that there is in orthodoxy. Their
mental attitude is apt to be quite as unfavorable to the discovery of
the truth as that of the other party. Between those who affirm, with
the threat of the withdrawal of fellowship, and those who deny, with the
sense of injury and oppression, the truth has a poor chance for itself
in this