as they are not contravened directly enough to suggest disobedience, they may be readily contravened indirectly; for the reason that there has not been cultivated the habit of contemplating consequences as they work out in remote ways. Hence it happens that social arrangements essentially at variance with the ethics of the creed give no offence to those who are profoundly offended by whatever seems at variance with its theology. Maintenance of the dogmas and forms of the religion becomes the primary, all-essential thing; and the secondary thing, often sacrificed, is the securing of those relations among men which, the spirit of the religion requires. How conceptions of good and bad in social affairs are thus warped, the pending controversy about the Athanasian creed shows us. Here we have theologians who believe that our national welfare will be endangered, if there is not in all churches an enforced repetition of the dogmas that Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, are each of them Almighty; that yet there are not three Almighties, but one Almighty; that one of the Almighties suffered on the cross and descended into hell to pacify another of them; and that, whoever does not believe this, "without doubt shall perish everlastingly." They say that, if the State makes its priests threaten with eternal torments all who doubt these doctrines, things will go well; but, if those priests, who, in this threat, perceive the devil-worship of the savage usurping the name of Christianity, are allowed to pass it by in silence, woe to the nation! Evidently the theological bias leading to such a conviction entirely excludes Sociology, considered as a science.
Under its special forms, as well as under its general form, the theological bias brings errors into the estimates men make of societies and institutions. Sectarian antipathies, growing out of differences of doctrine, disable the members of each religious community from fairly judging other religious communities. It is always difficult, and often impossible, for the zealot to conceive that his own religious system and his own zeal on its behalf may have but a relative truth and a relative value; or to conceive that there may be relative truths and relative values in alien beliefs and the fanaticisms which maintain them. Though the adherent of each creed has continually thrust on his attention the fact that adherents of other creeds are no less confident than he is—though he can scarcely fail sometimes to reflect that these adherents of other creeds have, in nearly all cases, simply accepted the dogmas current in the places and families they were born in, and that he has done the like—yet the special theological bias which his education and surroundings have given him, makes it almost beyond imagination that these other creeds may, some of them, have justifications as good as, if not better than, his own, and that the rest, along with certain amounts of absolute worth, may have their special fitnesses to the people holding them.
