TRUE AND FALSE TOLERATION.
By Editor
THE Sunday School Times well says on the above subject: "Many people confuse tolerance and indifference. They think they are tolerant in their feeling, when, as a matter of fact, they do not care enough to have any feeling. How often will a man who is interested in politics speak and act most bitterly toward those whose political principles are not his own, and yet think himself tolerant because he does not care enough about matters of religion to mind differences of opinion there! Matters of truth and faith are worth feeling about. They are so much worth feeling about that it is better to be bigoted because we feel strongly about them, than it would be not to feel about them at all. The old Puritan who has written as his epitaph in the ancient Massachusetts churchyard, Let men of God in church and nation watch
'Gainst such as would a toleration hatch,
is more honorable in our eyes than the modern dilettante who feels very strongly about the color of his cravats, but has no feeling about errors in religious truth. Yet there is a Christian and genuine toleration which is not indifference. It consists with the most deep and serious feeling. This toleration cares about truth, and cares about what seems errors of truth in its teaching; but it rests confidently in faith that truth will win its own victories in God's good time; and consistently on the knowledge that love is greater even than truth, and must break the path in places where truth has not yet appeared. This is the tolerance of faith and charity, which a man shows in places where he feels deeply, whether those places be in politics or in religion." But this is the charity, the love of perfect truth. So, while love may seem greater than truth, after all love is the fruit of truth; it is the truth of God in operation. More than this, the Christian grants more than mere tolerance; he grants, nay, he demands, freedom for his opponent, for he knows God will care for His truth, and only in free minds can truth hold a place.