Evening Journal

The trustees of Lane Theological Seminary on Wednesday accepted the resignation of Professor Roberts, one of the prosecutors of Professor Henry Preserved Smith in his trial for heresy. The trustees also re-elected Professor Henry Preserved Smith for the ensuing year.

It would seem, from the results, that this trial for heresy had not been prosperous. Is it not a fact that heresy trials are out of date? This, if not the wrong century, is, at least, the wrong end of it to persecute an honorable, talented, good man for views on technical questions of belief which do not involve the moral effects of a man's teachings, do not influence his mode of life for good or evil. If a man's life is free from evil his doctrines cannot be capable of much mischief. That is more than can be said for the bitter persecutors, who, like Professor Roberts, pursue a man with ill-disguised hate because his interpretation of some dead dogma does not agree with the interpretation put on it by a stern theologian of the rugged period of the sixteenth century.