Teasing

Bad Bishop Brown (TIME, June 9), found guilty of heresy by eight good P. E. bishops and true, at Cleveland, May 31, has appealed to a special Court of Review which will meet in October and of which Bishop William A. Leonard of Cleveland is President. The attorneys for the heretic cited 20 "assignments in error"--for example that one of the Bishop-Judges was not a lawful member of the Court, that another was not properly notified. But all this is the merest trivia triviarum. The simple truth is that, if ever there was, or is, or shall be a heretic, Bishop Brown is a heretic and knows it. Furthermore, the Bishop, having long since retired and being in fairly comfortable circumstances, cannot be materially injured by being condemned a heretic. Why, then, his vigorous lawsuit? The answer is simple. Bishop Brown is teasing the Protestant Episcopal Church. And he is doing it with the childish delight of eccentric genius. The annoying old heretic maintains that the Protestant Episcopal Church cannot define heresy until it has first defined orthodoxy. It cannot say: "That is Error," until it has first said: "This is Truth." In other words--the trick is a masterpiece of dialectical neatness--it is impossible to have heresy on the one hand without having infallibility on the other. Now, as everyone knows, the Protestant Episcopal Church has never claimed infallibility, except in a sense so metaphysical that its infallibility is of no practical significance. Hence, says the Bad Bishop, the Protestant Episcopal Church cannot logically pronounce upon heresy. Hence, the Bishop is no heretic.

Thus, before he is thorough, this charming old villain may very well persuade the Protestant Episcopal Church to abandon heresy-trials, to protect itself from the uncongenial members by divorcing them from the Church on the much simpler grounds of incompatibility. So wisdom will be justified of its eccentric children.