It was these assemblies, which later on, with the aid of the support of the temporal power, passed into mighty institutions, that were the chief impediments in the dissemination of the true comprehension of Christ’s teaching.
Nor could it be otherwise: the chief peculiarity of Christ’s teaching, as distinguished from all the former teachings, consisted in this, that the men who accepted it tried more and more to understand and fulfil the teaching, whereas the church doctrine asserted the full and final comprehension and fulfilment of this teaching.
However strange it may seem to us people educated in the false doctrine about the church as a Christian institution, and in the contempt for heresy, it was only in what is called heresy that there was true motion, that is, true Christianity, and it ceased to be such when it stopped its motion in these heresies and became itself arrested in the immovable forms of the church.
Indeed, what is a heresy? Read all the theological works which treat about heresies, a subject which is the first to present itself for definition, since every theology speaks of the true teaching amidst the surrounding false teachings, that is, heresies, and you will nowhere find anything resembling a definition of heresy.
As a specimen of that complete absence of any semblance of a definition of what is understood by the word “heresy” may serve the opinion on this subject expressed by the learned historian of Christianity, E. de Pressensé, in his Histoire du Dogme , with the epigraph, “ Ubi Christus, ibi Ecclesia ” (Paris, 1869). This is what he says in his introduction: “ Je sais que l’on nous conteste le droit de qualifier ainsi ,” that is, to call heresies “ les tendances qui furent si vivement combattues par les