tant
difference. The Christian fathers practised reserve for the sake of
leading the acolyte the more surely to the fulness of truth. The modern
economiser keeps back his opinions, or dissembles the grounds of them,
for the sake of leaving his neighbours the more at their ease in the
peaceful sloughs of prejudice and superstition and low ideals. We quote
Saint Paul when he talked of making himself all things to all men, and
of becoming to the Jews a Jew, and as without the Law to the heathen.
But then we do so with a view to justifying ourselves for leaving the
Jew to remain a Jew, and the heathen to remain heathen. We imitate the
same apostle in accepting old time-worn altars dedicated to the Unknown
God. We forget that he made the ancient symbol the starting-point of a
revolutionised doctrine. There is, as anybody can see, a whole world of
difference between the reserve of sagacious apostleship, on the one
hand, dealing tenderly with scruple and tearfulness and fine sensibility
of conscience, and the reserve of intellectual cowardice on the other
hand, dealing hypocritically with narrow minds in the supposed interests
of social peace and quietness. The old _disciplina arcani_ signified
the disclosure of a little light with a view to the disclosure of more.
The new means the dissimulation of truth with a view to the perpetuation
of error. Consider the difference between these two fashions of
compromise, in their effects upon the mind and character of the person
compromising. The one is fully compatible with fervour and hopefulness
and devotion to great causes. The other stamps a man with artifice, and
hinders the free eagerness of his vision, and wraps him about with
mediocrity,--not always of understanding, but that still worse thing,
mediocrity of aspiration and purpose.

The coarsest and most revolting shape which the doctrine of conformity
can assume, and its degrading consequences to the character of the
conformer, may be conveniently illustrated by a passage in the life of
Hume. He looked at things in a more practical manner than would find
favour with the sentimental champions of compromise in nearer times.
There is a well-known letter of Hume's, in which he recommends a young
man to become a clergyman, on the ground that it was very hard to got
any tolerable civil employment, and that as Lord Bute was then all
powerful, his friend would be certain of preferment. In answer to the
young man's scruples as to the A