nce the heartiness with which
the great corporation of lawyers, for example, resist the removal of
superfluous and obstructive forms in their practice; they have come to
look on such forms as indispensable safeguards. Hence powerful teachers
and preachers of all kinds have been spontaneously inclined to suppose
a necessity, which had no real existence, of preserving as much as was
possible of what we know to be error, even while introducing wholesome
modification of it. This is the honest, though mischievous, conservatism
of the human mind. We have no right to condemn our foregoers; far less
to lavish on them the evil names of impostor, charlatan, and brigand,
which the zealous unhistoric school of the last century used so
profusely. But we have a right to say of them, as we say of those who
imitate their policy now, that their conservatism is no additional proof
of the utility of error. Least of all is it any justification for those
who wish to have impressed upon the people a complete system of
religious opinion which men of culture have avowedly put away. And,
moreover, the very priests must, I should think, be supposed to have put
it away also. Else they would hardly be invited deliberately to abdicate
their teaching functions in the very seats where teaching is of the
weightiest and most far-spreading influence.

Meanwhile our point is that the reforms in opinion which have been
effected on the plan of pouring the new wine of truth into the old
bottles of superstition--though not dishonourable to the sincerity of
the reformers--are no testimony to even the temporary usefulness of
error. Those who think otherwise do not look far enough in front of the
event. They forget the evil wrought by the prolonged duration of the
error, to which the added particle of truth may have given new vitality.
They overlook the ultimate enervation that is so often the price paid
for the temporary exaltation.

Nor, finally, can they know the truths which the error thus prolonged
has hindered from coming to the birth. A strenuous disputant has
recently asserted against me that 'the region of the _might have been_
lies beyond the limits of sane speculation.'[12] It in surely extending
optimism too far to insist on carrying it back right through the ages.
To me at any rate the history of mankind is a huge _pis-aller_, just as
our present society is; a prodigious wasteful experiment, from which a
certain number of precious results have bee