erians are orthodox; the Quakers, the Methodists, Wesleyans and
otherwise, are orthodox; for our purpose popular language is sufficient.

Heresy, says Tertullian, is the result of wisdom, real or assumed. He
writes: "The philosophers are the fathers of the heretics." It is
computed that there have been no less than five hundred distinct
heresies. Happily for us, most of them are dead and buried in Greek and
Latin folios, rarely read and still more rarely understood. The East was
the land of heresy. Every day saw the birth of a new one amongst a
people of subtle intellect and endowed with a language wonderfully
contrived to express the most delicate and phantasmal forms of belief.
We laugh at the schoolmen, at their barbarous Latin and incomprehensible
disputations. No one now ventures to discuss how many angels could stand
upon the point of a needle, but in the early ages of the Church the
Fathers wasted their lives in disputations equally windy and barren of
practical result. "Greek Christianity," writes Dean Milman, "was
insatiably inquisitive, speculative. Confident in the inexhaustible
copiousness and fine precision of its language, it endured no limit to
its curious investigations. As each great question was settled or worn
out, it was still ready to propose new ones. It began with the Divinity
of Christ, still earlier perhaps with some of the gnostic cosmogonical or
theophanic theories, so onward to the Trinity; it expired, or at least
drew near its end, as the religion of the Roman East, discussing the
Divine light on Mount Tabor." Extinct long ago are the questions to
settle which Church councils were held, fanatic monks swarmed into
Constantinople by hundreds from far away--Syrian, or Arabian, or African
deserts--and armies took the field. Even a vowel might stir up strife
and bloodshed. The enmity of the Homoousian to the Homiousian was as
bitter as that between Guelph and Ghibelline, as that of Capulet and
Montague; and only the pen of a Swift could do justice to the brawls

"Bred of an airy word."

Heresy can be put down in two ways. You may argue it out of existence,
or you may crush it out with the sword. As soon as ever the alliance
between Church and State was formed, the latter was the favourite mode of
dealing with heretics; it saved so much trouble. If you cut off a
heretics head, you are certain to stop his heretical tongue. There is an
end of his pestiferous logic. Continue th