excuse lies on the same level
as the rest. All are equally worthless as answers to the generous
solicitation of enlightened conscience. Suppose, then, that each man on
whom in turn the new ideas dawned wore to borrow the compromiser's plea
and imitate his example. We know what would happen. The exploit in
which no one will consent to go first, remains unachieved. You wait
until there are persons enough agreeing with you to form an effective
party? But how are the members of the band to know one another, if all
are to keep their dissent from the old, and their adherence to the new,
rigorously private? And how many members constitute the innovating band
an effective force! When one-half of the attendants at a church are
unbelievers, will that warrant us in ceasing to attend, or shall we
tarry until the dissemblers number two-thirds? Conceive the additions
which your caution has made to the moral integrity of the community in
the meantime. Measure the enormous hindrances that will have been placed
in the way of truth and improvement, when the day at last arrives on
which you and your two-thirds take heart to say that falsehood and abuse
have now reached their final term, and must at length be swept away into
the outer darkness. Consider how much more terrible the shock of change
will be when it does come, and how much less able will men be to meet
it, and to emerge successfully from it.

Perhaps the compromiser shrinks, not because he fears to march alone,
but because he thinks that the time has not yet come for the progressive
idea which he has made his own, and for whose triumph one day he
confidently hopes. This plea may mean two wholly different states of the
case. The time has not yet come for what? For making those positive
changes in life or institution, which the change in idea must ultimately
involve? That is one thing. Or for propagating, elaborating, enforcing
the new idea, and strenuously doing all that one can to bring as many
people as possible to a state of theory, which will at last permit the
requisite change in practice to be made with safety and success? This is
another and entirely different thing. The time may not have come for the
first of these two courses. The season may not be advanced enough for us
to push on to active conquest. But the time has always come, and the
season is never unripe, for the announcement of the fruitful idea.

We must go further than that. In so far as it can be done by one