Prescient words. . . written more than 85 years ago but ever contemporary:
America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance. It is not. It is suffering from tolerance: tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so much overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broad-minded. The man who can make up his mind in an orderly way, as a man might make up his bed, is called a bigot; but a man who cannot make up his mind, any more than he can make up for lost time, is called tolerant and broad-minded...
Another evidence of the breakdown of reason that has produced this weird fungus of broad-mindedness is the passion of novelty, as opposed to the love of truth. Truth is sacrificed for an epigram, the Divinity of Christ for a headline in the Monday morning newspaper. Many a modern preacher is far less concerned with preaching Christ and Him crucified than he is with his popularity with his congregation. A want of intellectual backbone makes him straddle the ox of truth and the ass of nonsense, paying compliments to Catholics because of “their great organization” and to sexologists because of “their honest challenge to the youth of this generation.” Bending the knee to the mob rather than God would probably make them scruple at ever playing the role of John the Baptist before a modern Herod. No accusing finger would be leveled at a divorce or one living in adultery; no voice would be thundered in the ears of the rich, saying with something of the intolerance of Divinity: “It is not lawful for thee to live with thy brother’s wife.” Rather would we hear: “Friends, times are changing!” The acids of modernity are eating away the fossils of orthodoxy...
The final argument for modern broad-mindedness is that truth is novelty and hence “truth” changes with the passing fancies of the moment. Like the chameleon that changes his colors to suit the vesture on which he is placed, so truth is supposed to change to fit the foibles and obliquities of the age. The nature of certain things is fixed, and none more so than the nature of truth. Truth may be contradicted a thousand times, but that only proves that it is strong enough to survive a thousand assaults. But for any one to say, “Some say this, some say that, therefore, there is no truth,” is about as logical as it would have been for Columbus who heard some say, “The earth is round”, and others say “The earth is flat” to conclude: “Therefore, there is no earth.” Like a carpenter who might throw away his rule and use each beam as a measuring rod, so, too, those who have thrown away the standard of objective truth have nothing left with which to measure but the mental fashion of the moment...
In the face of this false broadmindedness, what the world needs is intolerance. The world seems to have lost entirely the faculty of distinguishing between good and bad, the right and the wrong. There are some minds that believe that intolerance is always wrong, because they make “intolerance” mean hate, narrow-mindedness, and bigotry. These same minds believe that tolerance is always right because, for them, it means charity, broadmindedness, and American good nature...The Church is identified with Christ in both me and principle; She began thinking on His first principles and the harder She thought, the more dogmas She developed. She never forgot those dogmas; She remembered them and Her memory is Tradition. The dogmas of the Church are like bricks, solid things with which a man can build, not like straw, which is “religious experience” fit only for burning. The Church has been and will always be intolerant so far as the rights of God are concerned, for heresy, error, and untruth affect not personal matters on which She may yield, but a Divine Right in which there is no yielding. The truth is divine; the heretic is human. Due reparation made, the Church will admit the heretic back into the treasury of Her souls, but never the heresy into the treasure of Her Wisdom. Right is right even if nobody is right; and wrong is wrong if everybody is wrong...
Though written in 1931, they speak just as clearly today to a situation in which tolerance as false virtue has been set against truth to lead us to believe that there is no truth -- only the morass of desire, feelings, choice, and preference. In case you cannot figure out the author, this little gem comes from the Archbishop who had a program on ABC TV in the 1950s.... None other than Fulton J. Sheen...
2 comments:
As a Roman Catholic from 1953-1976, I was raised in this Tradition. I admit that life was much simpler then. The Second Vatican Council through the Church into turmoil, and just about everything was questioned or open to discussion.
When Rome finally saw the chaos that was introduced, it was too late to close the barn door. Not even the Roman Tribe of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church is Orthodox any more .
Becoming Lutheran, for me, was incredibly freeing, especially from the "eating meat on Friday is a Mortal Sin" days, but I soon discovered that the LCMS is more jumbled than my old Tribe. I have thoroughly loved my decades in the Office of the Holy Ministry, though I still believe that the Ecclesiology of my adopted Synod is very deficient, which has lead to the "everyone a minister" stuff that still plagues us and will until another Reformation of how we exist as a part of The Church is accomplished. That, as they say, is well above the pay grade of this newly Emeritus Pastor!
The Church is identified with Christ in both me and principle.
Was there a transcription error?
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