ns, Jews, Moslems, and Parsis to knowledge, sacred books being
the occasions, are numerous and important.

+1136+. Along with these beneficent influences there have been others
less praiseworthy. As any sacred book belongs to a particular age, it
inevitably, in the course of time, falls into disaccord with later ideas
on certain points. When this happens there are always some persons who,
failing to discriminate between the local and transitory and the
permanent, unjustly reject the book _in toto_; others, making a
distinction, take it as a literary product, accept what they think
valuable, and treat the rest as an imperfect product of the past. Those
who accept the book as divinely inspired and therefore, as they think,
infallible either maintain literally all its statements (cosmological,
historical, eschatological, and other) or else undertake to interpret
certain of them in accordance with current views. When such
interpretation is forced, it becomes intellectually and morally an
evil--it accustoms the religious public to logical distortions, and it
nourishes a disingenuousness that easily becomes immoral. The belief
that a sacred book is final authority often results in limitation of
freedom of thought--certain things are excluded from discussion. The
instinctive demand for freedom asserts itself, however, in various ways:
sometimes, as described above, a desired sense is obtained by violence;
sometimes a religious body that is regarded by its adherents as
authoritative interpreter changes its decision, in accord with the
spirit of a new age, and grants liberty where it had previously refused
it The treatment of sacred books follows the phases of general culture.

The dogmatic statements of these books are condensed into creeds, which
become organic law.[2085] They express each the interpretation put by a
given church on the words of its sacred Scriptures. The interpretations
are the outcome of historical processes, the final result of which is a
formulation of the ideas of its time; where the same sacred book is
accepted by several churches, there may be several different creeds
based on the one book--that is, churches and creeds alike are subject to
the variations of human opinion that result from differences of
temperament, social surroundings, and general culture. Creeds are
convenient and effective manuals. They may be made to change their
meaning by processes of interpretation; elasticity in a creed is
favor