l conscience and check the free play and access of
intellectual light.

Here we may leave the conditions that have made an inquiry as to some of
the limits of compromise, which must always be an interesting and
important subject, one of especial interest and importance to ourselves
at present. Is any renovation of the sacredness of principle a possible
remedy for some of these elements of national deterioration? They will
not disappear until the world has grown into possession of a new
doctrine. When that comes, all other good things will follow. What we
have to remember is that the new doctrine itself will never come, except
to spirits predisposed to their own liberation. Our day of small
calculations and petty utilities must first pass away; our vision of the
true expediencies must reach further and deeper; our resolution to
search for the highest verities, to give up all and follow them, must
first become the supreme part of ourselves.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: See below, ch. iii.]

[Footnote 2: _System of Logic_, bk. vi. ch. xi.]

[Footnote 3: Bagehot.]

[Footnote 4: Dr. J.H. Newman's _Essays Critical and Historical_, vol. i.
p. 301.]

CHAPTER II.

OF THE POSSIBLE UTILITY OF ERROR.

_Das Wahre foerdert; aus dem Irrthum entwickelt
sich nichts, er verwickeltuns nur.--_
GOETHE.

At the outset of an inquiry how far existing facts ought to be allowed
to overrule ideas and principles that are at variance with them, a
preliminary question lies in our way, about which it may be well to say
something. This is the question of a dual doctrine. In plainer words,
the question whether it is expedient that the more enlightened classes
in a community should upon system not only possess their light in
silence, but whether they should openly encourage a doctrine for the
less enlightened classes which they do not believe to be true for
themselves, while they regard it as indispensably useful in the case of
less fortunate people. An eminent teacher tells us how after he had
once succeeded in presenting the principle of Necessity to his own mind
in a shape which seemed to bring with it all the advantages of the
principle of Free Will, he 'no longer suffered under the burden so heavy
to one who aims at being a reformer in opinions, of thinking one
doctrine true, and the contrary doctrine morally beneficial.'[5] The
discrepancy which this writer thought a heavy burden has struck others
as the basis