eason, and the partisans of the letter against the
spirit, then this result follows. They are deliberately strengthening
the hands of the persons least fitted by judgment, experience, and
temper, for using such power rightly. And they are strengthening them
not merely in dealing with religious matters, but, what is of more
importance, in dealing with an endless variety of the gravest social and
political matters. It is impossible to map out the exact dimensions of
the field in which a man shall exercise his influence, and to which he
is to be rigorously confined. Give men influence in one matter,
especially if that be such a matter as religious belief and ceremonial,
and it is simply impossible that this influence shall not extend with
more or less effect over as much of the whole sphere of conduct as they
may choose surrendering the common people without dispute or effort to
organised priesthoods for religious purposes, you would be inevitably
including a vast number of other purposes in the self-same destination.
This does not in the least prejudice practical ways of dealing with
certain existing circumstances, such as the propriety or justice of
allowing a catholic people to have a catholic university. It is only an
argument against erecting into a complete and definite formula the
division of a society into two great castes, the one with a religion of
the spirit, the other with a creed of the letter.

Again, supposing that the enlightened caste were to consent to abandon
the common people to what are assumed to be lower and narrower forms of
truth,--which is after all little more than a fine phrase for forms of
falsehood,--what can be more futile than to suppose that such a
compromise will be listened to for a single moment by a caste whose
first principle is that they are the possessors and ministers, not of an
inferior or superior form of truth, but of the very truth itself,
absolute, final, complete, divinely sent, infallibly interpreted? The
disciples of the relative may afford to compromise. The disciples of the
absolute, never.

We shall see other objections as we go on to this state of things, in
which a minority holds true opinions and abandons the majority to false
ones. At the bottom of the advocacy of a dual doctrine slumbers the idea
that there is no harm in men being mistaken, or at least only so little
harm as is more than compensated for by the marked tranquillity in which
their mistake may wrap them