to realise and
follow by the person most deeply interested, veiled and clouded to
lookers-on, because naturally belonging to the deepest depths of the
human conscience, and inevitably, and without much fault on either side,
liable to be misinterpreted and misunderstood. And this process is all
the more tangled when it goes on, not in an individual mind, travelling
in its own way on its own path, little affected by others, and little
affecting them, but in a representative person, with the
responsibilities of a great cause upon him, bound by closest ties of
every kind to friends, colleagues, and disciples, thinking, feeling,
leading, pointing out the way for hundreds who love and depend on him.
Views and feelings vary from day to day, according to the events and
conditions of the day. How shall he speak, and how shall he be silent?
How shall he let doubts and difficulties appear, yet how shall he
suppress them?--doubts which may grow and become hopeless, but which, on
the other hand, may be solved and disappear. How shall he go on as if
nothing had happened, when all the foundations of the world seem to have
sunk from under him? Yet how shall he disclose the dreadful secret, when
he is not yet quite sure whether his mind will not still rally from its
terror and despair? He must in honesty, in kindness, give some warning,
yet how much? and how to prevent it being taken for more than it means?
There are counter-considerations, to which he cannot shut his eyes.
There are friends who will not believe his warnings. There are watchful
enemies who are on the look-out for proofs of disingenuousness and bad
faith. He could cut through his difficulties at once by making the
plunge in obedience to this or that plausible sign or train of
reasoning, but his conscience and good faith will not let him take
things so easily; and yet he knows that if he hangs on, he will be
accused by and by, perhaps speciously, of having been dishonest and
deceiving. So subtle, so shifting, so impalpable are the steps by which
a faith is disintegrated; so evanescent, and impossible to follow, the
shades by which one set of convictions pass into others wholly opposite;
for it is not knowledge and intellect alone which come into play, but
all the moral tastes and habits of the character, its likings and
dislikings, its weakness and its strength, its triumphs and its
vexations, its keenness and its insensibilities, which are in full
action, while the intell