If today a minister feels that he can no longer believe in the articles of faith of the Baptist Church, he can turn Methodist, and if for some reason he ceases to believe in the creed as laid down by the Methodist Church, he can become a Unitarian or a Catholic or a Jew, or for that matter, a Hindoo or a Turk. The world is wide. The door is open. There is no one outside his own hungry family to say him nay. But this is an age of steamships and railroad trains and unlimited economic opportunities. The world of the fifth century was not quite so simple. It was far from easy to discover a region where the influence of the Bishop of Rome did not make itself felt. One could of course go to Persia or to India, as a good many heretics did, but the voyage was long and the chances of survival were small. And this meant perpetual banishment for one’s self and one’s children. And finally, why should a man surrender his good right to believe what he pleased if he felt sincerely that his conception of the idea of Christ was the right one and that it was only a question of time for him to convince the Church that its doctrines needed a slight modification? For that was the crux of the whole matter. The early Christians, both the faithful and the heretics, dealt with ideas which had a relative and not a positive value. A group of mathematicians, sending each other to the gallows because they cannot agree upon the absolute value of x would be no more absurd than a council of learned theologians trying to define the undefinable and endeavoring to reduce the substance of God to a formula. But so thoroughly had the spirit of self-righteousness and intolerance got hold of the world that until very recently all those who advocated tolerance upon the basis that “we cannot ever possibly know who is right and who is wrong” did so at the risk of their lives and usually couched their warnings in such careful Latin sentences that not more than one or two of their most intelligent readers ever knew what they meant. CHAPTER VI THE PURE OF LIFE Here is a little problem in mathematics which is not out of place in a book of history. Take a piece of string and make it into a circle, like this: [Illustration: I] In this circle all diameters will of course be equal. AB = CD = EF = GH and so on, ad infinitum. But turn the circle into an ellipse by slightly pulling two sides. Then the perfect balance is at once disturbed. The diameters are thrown out of gear. A few like AB and EF have been greatly shortened. Others, and especially CD, have been lengthened. [Illustration: II] Now transfer the problem from mathematics to history. Let us for the sake of argument suppose that AB represents politics CD ” trade EF ” art GH ” militarism In the figure I the perfectly balanced state, all lines are equally long and quite as much attention is paid to politics as to trade and art and militarism.