should do in my father's case, if by telling him at once
of my change, I gave him an unjust horror of Catholicism,--you do
not tell him the truth. . . . You may speak what is true to you,--
but it becomes an error when received into his mind. . . . If his
mind is a refracting and polarising medium--if the crystalline lens
of his soul's eye has been changed into tourmaline or Labrador spar-
-the only way to give him a true image of the fact, is to present it
to him already properly altered in form, and adapted to suit the
obliquity of his vision; in order that the very refractive power of
his faculties may, instead of distorting it, correct it, and make it
straight for him; and so a verbal wrong in fact may possess him with
a right opinion. . . .

'You see the whole question turns on your Protestant deification of
the intellect. . . . If you really believed, as you all say you do,
that the nature of man, and therefore his intellect among the rest,
was utterly corrupt, you would not be so superstitiously careful to
tell the truth . . . as you call it; because you would know that
man's heart, if not his head, would needs turn the truth into a lie
by its own corruption. . . . The proper use of reasoning is to
produce opinion,--and if the subject in which you wish to produce
the opinion is diseased, you must adapt the medicine accordingly.'

To all which Lancelot, with several strong curses, scrawled the
following answer:--

'And this is my Cousin Luke!--Well, I shall believe henceforward
that there is, after all, a thousand times greater moral gulf fixed
between Popery and Tractarianism, than between Tractarianism and the
extremest Protestantism. My dear fellow,--I won't bother you, by
cutting up your charming ambiguous middle terms, which make reason
and reasoning identical, or your theory that the office of reasoning
is to induce opinions--(the devil take opinions, right or wrong--I
want facts, faith in real facts!)--or about deifying the intellect--
as if all sound intellect was not in itself divine light--a
revelation to man of absolute laws independent of him, as the very
heathens hold. But this I will do--thank you most sincerely for the
compliment you pay us Cismontane heretics. We do retain some dim
belief in a God--even I am beginning to believe in believing in Him.
And therefore, as I begin to suppose, it is, that we reverence
facts, as the work of God, His acted words