Page:Dr Stiggins, His Views and Principles.pdf/177

 and complicated edifices, each widely differing from its neighbour, and each, if but poorly provided with the sanitary arrangements of real Christian piety, amply furnished, at all events, with a bristling armoury of controversial weapons, and with the boiling lead of theological acerbity. Arians and Catholics, Manicheans and Copts, Orthodox Greeks and Basilidians, Armenians and Anglicans raised their voices so loudly against one another that the thoughtful, as I say, were puzzled, and were content to stay without these contending folds (or rather camps), satisfying their religious instincts with the simple charities of the Gospel. And for some time after the Reformation, I am afraid, the Evangelical bodies perpetuated to a certain extent the evil leaven which had been handed down to them, and strove together about questions which seemed to them of vast importance but which we perceive to have been misunderstandings about trifles. Thus Calvin burned Servetus, thus Presbyterian contended with Independent, thus the Baptists were forced