ion, there is more and more of this reasoning by rote, so
that critical incompetence is more easily concealed and may lurk
unsuspected even in the pulpit and the professorial chair, where logic
alone seems paramount. The "hagnostic" greengrocer, in all the
self-confidence of his ignorance, is but the lower extreme of a class
that runs up much higher in the social scale and spreads out much wider
in every direction.

But when we have realized more adequately how hopelessly incompetent the
multitude must necessarily be in the problems of specialists, we shall
also see that it is only by inadequate and even sophistical reasoning
that most of their intellectual difficulties can be allayed; that the
full truth (and the half-truth is mostly a lie) would be Greek to them.
If, then, _Tracts for the Million_ seem a necessity, they also seem an
impossibility; for what self-respecting man will sit down to weave that
tissue of sophistry, special-pleading, violence, and vulgarity, which
alone will serve the practical purpose with those to whom trenchency is
everything and subtlety nothing? Even though the means involve a
violation of taste rather than of morals, yet can they be justified by
the goodness of the end? Fortunately, however, the difficulty is met by
a particular application of God's universal method in the education of
mankind. In every grade of enlightenment there are found some who are
sufficiently in advance of the rest to be able to help them, and not so
far in advance as practically to speak a different language. What is a
dazzling light for those just emerging from darkness, is darkness for
those in a yet stronger light. A statement may be so much less false
than another, as to be relatively true; so much less true than a third,
as to be relatively false. For a mind wholly unprepared, the full truth
is often a light that blinds and darkness; whereas the tempered
half-truth prepares the way for a fuller disclosure in due time, even as
the law and the prophets prepared the way for the Gospel and Christ, or
as the enigmas of faith school us to bear that light which now no man
can gaze on and live. Thus, though we may never use a lie in the
interest of truth, or bring men from error by arguments we know to be
sophistical, yet we have the warrant of Divine example, both in the
natural and supernatural education of mankind, for the passive
permission of error in the interest of truth, as also of evil in the
interest of g