Professor Zueblin on "Orthodoxy"

Professor Charles Zueblin, of the University of Chicago, delivered his second lecture on "A Democratic Religion" yesterday afternoon in Emerson A. The subject was "Orthodoxy" and the treatment was remarkably interesting and effective.

Professor Zueblin showed that orthodoxy was not confined to the realm of religion but was to be met with in politics, social customs, economics and other walks of life. In religion it shows itself as devotion to accepted tenets of belief, in politics as party loyalty, in social customs as race prejudice and alienation, and in economics as class consciousness.

However binding on the free mind orthodoxy may come to be, it contains the kernel of immutable truth. The resulting evils are caused by the emphasis of the non-essentials, the bare shell of the idea being emphasized to the exclusion of the true meaning.

As a matter of fact, orthodoxy is universal; many men of the most heterodoxical opinions in some walks of life are narrowly orthodoxy in others. Robert Ingersoll, the remarkably heterodoxical religious thinker, is a striking example of this, as his ideas in politics were narrow-gauge republican. Opposite orthodoxy stands liberty; but in our own age the freedom of the individual is often confused with the higher and nobler liberty of the intellect and the sprit. This must needs express the liberty of the individual to attain its ends, as true liberty is the untrammeled freedom of truth.