Tolerance

This Serbian peasant (he came from Uskub, the much disputed railroad junction of the late war) had no use for “book-learnin’.” It was by his orders that the ancient Athenian sch...

How it happened that a little rocky peninsula in a remote corner of the Mediterranean was able to provide our world in less than two centuries with the complete framework for al...

The rapid conquest of the western world by the Church is sometimes used as proof definite that the Christian ideas must have been of divine origin. It is not my business to deba...

The early church was a very simple organization. As soon as it became apparent that the end of the world was not at hand, that the death of Jesus was not to be followed immediat...

Just before the curtain rings down for the last time upon the ancient world, a figure crosses the stage which had deserved a better fate than an untimely death and the unflatter...

Here is a little problem in mathematics which is not out of place in a book of history. Take a piece of string and make it into a circle, like this:

In the year 1198 a certain Lotario, Count of Segni, succeeded to the high honors which his uncle Paolo had held only a few years before and as Innocent III took possession of th...

The first of these is perhaps the most general. It is to be met with in every country and among all classes of society. It is most common in small villages and old-established t...

I find it increasingly difficult to write history. I am rather like a man who has been trained to be a fiddler and then at the age of thirty-five is suddenly given a piano and o...

In the correspondence of Erasmus, which I recommend most eagerly to those who are tired of modern fiction, there occurs a stereotype sort of warning in many of the letters sent...

There is a learned cartoonist in our land who takes pleasure in asking himself, what do billiard-balls and cross-word puzzles and bull-fiddles and boiled shirts and door-mats th...

Modern psychology has taught us several useful things about ourselves. One of them is the fact that we rarely do anything actuated by one single motive. Whether we give a millio...

In the writing of every book there occurs a crisis. Sometimes it comes during the first fifty pages. Upon other occasions it does not make itself manifest until the manuscript i...

The name of Erasmus can be printed in a respectable book intended for the entire family. But to mention Rabelais in public is considered little short of a breach of good manners...

The greatest of modern poets saw the world as a large ocean upon which sailed many ships. Whenever these little vessels bumped against each other, they made a “wonderful music”...

The most popular “Outline of History” of the sixteenth century was a certain “World Book” or chronicle, which Sebastian Frank, soap-boiler, prohibitionist and author, living in...

In Italy the Reformation had never been successful. It could not be. In the first place, the people of the south did not take their religion seriously enough to fight about it a...

A little later, when conditions upon the European continent had improved so much that international commerce was once more becoming a possibility, another historical phenomenon...

The struggle for tolerance is part of the age-old conflict between “organized society” which places the continued safety of the “group” ahead of all other considerations and tho...

While the generals and the colonels and the three-star strategists sat in solitary splendor in the halls of some deserted château and contemplated miles of maps until they could...

There are certain things in history which I have never been able to understand and one of these is the amount of work done by some of the artists and literary men of bygone ages.

There was little reason to fear that the works of Spinoza would ever be popular. They were as amusing as a text-book on trigonometry and few people ever get beyond the first two...

The eighteenth century is usually referred to as an era of despotism. And in an age which believes in the dogma of democracy, despotism, however enlightened, is not apt to be re...

The house of Hohenzollern has never been famous for its love of popular forms of government. But ere the crazy strain of the Bavarian Wittelsbachs had tainted this sober-minded...

In this day and age we hear a great deal of talk about the nefarious labors of the press agent and many good people denounce “publicity” as an invention of the modern devil of s...

There are three different schools of statesmanship. The first one teaches a doctrine which reads somewhat as follows: “Our planet is inhabited by poor benighted creatures who ar...

The ancient edifice of official glory and unofficial misery known as the Kingdom of France came crashing down on a memorable evening in the month of August of the year of grace...

On the twentieth of September of the year 1792 a battle was fought between the armies of the French Revolution and the armies of the allied monarchs who had set forth to annihil...

During the first half of the seventeenth century the northern part of the American continent was settled by people who had gone so far in their devotion to the ideals of the Old...

Twelve years ago it would have been quite easy to write this book. The word “Intolerance,” in the minds of most people, was then almost exclusively identified with the idea of “...