The Logic of Toleration

As a result of the great religious wars the governing classes were forced to realize that unless they consented to the policy of toleration they would be ruined. There is no reason to suppose that except among a few idealists toleration has ever been much admired as a principle. It was originally, and in large measure it still is, nothing but a practical necessity. For in its interior life no church can wholly admit that its rivals may provide an equally good vehicle of salvation.

Martin Luther certainly had none of the modern notion that one church is about as good as the next. To be sure he appealed to the right of private judgment, but he made it plain nevertheless that in his opinion "pagans or Turks or Jews or fake Christians" would "remain under eternal wrath and an everlasting damnation." John Calvin let it be known in no uncertain tone that he did not wish any new sects in Geneva. Milton, writing his beautiful essay on liberty, drew the line at Papists. And in our own day the Catholic Encyclopedia says in the course of an eloquent argument for practical civic toleration that "as the true God can tolerate no strange gods, the true Church of Christ can tolerate no strange churches beside herself, or, what amounts to the same, she can recognize none as theoretically justified." This is the ancient dogma that outside the church there is no salvation ---extra ecclesiam nulla salus. Like many another dogma of the Roman church, it is not even in theory absolutely unbending. Thus it appears from the allocution of Pope Plus IX, Singulari quadam (1854), that "those who are ignorant of the true religion, if their ignorance is invincible (which means, if they have never had a chance to know the true religion) are not, in this matter, guilty of any fault in the sight of God."

As a consequence of the modern theory of religious freedom the churches find themselves in an anomalous position. Inwardly, to their communicants, they continue to assert that they possess the only complete version of the truth. But outwardly, in their civic relations with other churches and with the civil power, they preach and practice toleration. The separation of church and state involves more than a mere logical difficulty for the churchman. It involves a deep psychological difficulty for the members of the congregation. As communicants they are expected to believe without reservation that their church is the only true means of salvation; otherwise the multitude of separate sects would be meaningless. But as citizens they are expected to maintain a neutral indifference to the claims of all the sects, and to resist encroachments by any one sect upon the religious practices of the others. This is the best compromise which human wisdom has as yet devised, but it has one inevitable consequence which the superficial advocates of toleration often overlook. It is difficult to remain warmly convinced that the authority of any one sect is divine, when as a matter of daily experience all sects have to be treated alike.

The human soul is not so divided in compartments that a man can be indifferent in one part of his soul and firmly believing in another. The existence of rival sects, the visible demonstration that none has a monopoly, the habit of neutrality, cannot but dispose men against an unquestioning acceptance of the authority of one sect. So many faiths, so many loyalties, are offered to the modern man that at last none seems to him wholly inevitable and fixed in the order of the universe. The existence of many churches in one community weakens the foundation of all of them. And that is why every church in the heyday of its power proclaims itself to be catholic and intolerant.

But when there are many churches in the same community, none can make wholly good the claim that it is catholic. None has that power to discipline the individual which a universal church exercises. For, as Dr. Figgis puts it, when many churches are tolerated, "excommunication has ceased to be tyrannical by becoming futile."