The effort at a forced union on a speculative human creed was never entirely successful. In the fastnesses of the mountains the Waldenses, Albigenses and others, maintained their religious freedom. The fire of religious liberty was smouldering, but not extinguished. It was covered with the black coals of ecclesiastical ignorance, brutality and tyranny; but by and by it worked its way to the light and illuminated the darkness of the age. The great Reformation burst forth into a mighty inextinguishable flame all over Europe, and, overleaping great barriers, it blazed forth in America. The ecclesiastical shackles were torn asunder and the people were set free. I speak of the ultimate outcome, for this end was only attained after centuries of effort. Hereditary religious ideas, prejudices and customs become petrified, and it is only with the most desperate and long-continued efforts that individuals and bodies of people can free themselves from them. Failing to recognize how they are blinded through hereditary bias, environment and limited ideas, people imagine they have attained unto the ultimate truth, and thus their growth in knowledge ceases and they become fossilized into a sectarian party. People imagine that they are free when they are delivered from religious and political tyrants that persecute and oppress them; but their greatest bondage, and the one that makes the others possible, is the hereditary and acquired prejudice, bias, bigotry and ignorance within themselves. The struggle of the Reformation was for religious freedom. This struggle was by no means always unselfish and consistent. Protestants as well as Roman Catholics used force to crush those that would not submit to their creeds. Both in Europe and in America men's bodies were tortured and destroyed with the hope of saving their souls and in the endeavor to maintain the unity of the church. Even where the church and the state were separated so that the church could not use the civil law to persecute its opponents, other means of coercion were used, such as boycotting, ostracism, excommunication and anathemas. The idea of the Roman Catholic Church is that you cannot trust the people to interpret the Bible for themselves; the Pope and the church must do it for them. The idea of Protestant sectarian creeds is largely the same. The members cannot be trusted to interpret the Bible for themselves, so the creed-makers have to do it for them. The difference is in degree and power of oppression rather than in kind. The entire idea is fundamentally wrong. Speculative theology cannot save any one and sectarian creeds are harder to understand than the Bible itself. The people need the living, loving, personal Christ, and not the dry husks of speculative theology. We want uniformity in matters of faith that are clearly revealed and in allegiance to Christ, but do not need it in speculative opinions based on inferences as to what the Bible teaches.