Читать книгу I don't know, do you? онлайн

5 страница из 22

We can all see how much improvement there has been in all things but creeds. Improvements can come, and old things go, but creeds go on forever! A creed implies something fixed and immovable. In other words, it means you have a "heel-rope on."

The word "creed" is from credo, "I believe." We have had a great deal of compulsion of belief, and a thousand years of almost absolute unanimity. Liberty was dead and the ages were dark. We call them the Middle Ages because they were the death between the life that was before and the life that came after. Then came a new birth of thought—a "Renaissance"—and after this, some reformation in the form of a Protestantism.

Since then, the Protestants have continued to protest, not only against the old, but against each other. And this is the best thing they have done. Thus liberty has been saved, for each would have coerced its fellow organization, as did their infamous mother, the Roman Catholic Church, before them. From "creed" comes "credulous" and "credulity." And they have filled the world with their kind. In the United States alone, there are about one hundred forty types. Each is a system of credulity pitted against a hundred and thirty-nine others. They all rest on authority. They all denounce investigation—unless it has for its end the support of their authority.