The word heretic ought to be a term of honor; for honest, clearly uttered heresy is always virtuous, and this whether truth or error; yet it is not difficult to understand how the charge of heresy has been generally used as a means of exciting bad feeling. The Greek word [--Greek--] which is in fact our word heresy, signifies simply selection or choice. The heretic philosopher was the one who had searched and found, who, not content with the beaten paths, had selected a new road, chosen a new fashion of travelling in the march for that happiness all human-kind are seeking. Heretics are usually called “infidels,” but no word could be more unfairly applied, if by it is meant anything more than that the heretic does not conform to the State faith. If it meant those who do not profess the faith, then there would be no objection, but it is more often used of those who are unfaithful, and then it is generally a libel. Mahomedans and Christians both call Jews infidels, and Mahomedans and Christians call each other infidels. Each religionist is thus an infidel to all sects but his own; there is but one degree of heresy between him and the heretic who rejects all churches. Each ordinary orthodox man is a heretic to every religion in the world except one, but he is heretic from the accident of birth without the virtue of true heresy. In our own country heresy is not confined to the extreme platform adopted as a standing-point by such a man as myself. It is rife even in the state-sustained Church of England, and to show this one does not need to be content with such illustrations as are afforded by the Essayists and Reviewers, who discover the sources of the world’s education rather in Greece and Italy than in Judea; who reject the alleged prophecies as evidence of the Messianic character of Jesus; who admit that in nature and from nature, by science and by reason, we neither have, nor can possibly have, any evidence of a deity working miracles; but declare that for that we must go out of nature and beyond science, and in effect avow that Gospel miracles are always _objects,_ not _evidences_, of faith; who deny the necessity of faith in Jesus as savior to peoples who could never have such faith; and who reject the notion that all mankind are individually involved in the curse and perdition of Adam’s sin; or even by the Rev. Charles Voysey, who declines to preach “the God of the Bible,” and who will not teach that every word of the Old and New Testament is the word of God; or by the Rev, Dunbar Heath, who in defiance of the Bible doctrine, that man has only existed on the earth about 6,000 years, teaches that unnumbered chiliads have passed away since the human family can be traced as nations on our earth; or by Bishop Colenso, who in his impeachment of the Pentateuch, his denial of the literal truth of the narratives of the creation, fall, and deluge, actually impugns the whole scheme of