For the priest, above all, toleration is necessarily a hard virtue. One ought not to lay great stress upon the old argument of the Hallam and Macaulay school as to the strength of vested interests, though it has a certain historical importance because the priest must subsist somehow.[1] Vested interests are, after all, merely a secondary factor. But in the priest the emotional bias of the ordinary man has tenfold strength. By a natural process men who cling most to the instinct of veneration for the past and of enthusiastic obedience to present authority are drawn to the priesthood. They are often the most loveable and the most human of their kind; but their very strength of conviction and inaccessibility to plain reasoning in certain matters makes real tolerance for them extremely difficult. Indeed, they have often frankly admitted, especially in these days, that supernatural truths are bound up with the heart and not with the head.
The psychology of this attitude has been most felicitously sketched by Emerson, in his essay on Self-Reliance:—"Every new mind is a classification. . . . But in all unbalanced minds the classification is idolised, passes for the end and not for a
- ↑ It is not unfair, however, to quote the case of Dr Middleton, who, writing to Lord Radnor in 1750 in respect of his famous work on Miracles, admits frankly enough that he would never have given the clergy any trouble, had he received some good appointment in the church.
