on, as of all other principles,
must, in order to grow, be felt from time to time as inadequate and
untrue. There are men and ages whose mission is--

"to shake
This torpor of assurance from our creed,
Re-introduce the doubt discarded, bring
That formidable danger back, we drove
Long ago to the distance and the dark."[B]

[Footnote B: _Ibid._, 1853-1856.]

Such a spirit of criticism seems to many to exercise a merely
destructive power, and those who have not felt the inadequacy of the
inherited faith defend themselves against it, as the enemy of their
lives. But no logic, or assailing doubt, could have power against the
testimony of "the heart," unless it was rooted in deeper and truer
principles than those which it attacked. Nothing can overpower truth
except a larger truth; and, in such a conflict, the truth in the old
view will ultimately take the side of the new, and find its subordinate
position within it. It has happened, not infrequently, as in the case of
the Encyclopaedists, that the explicit truths of reason were more
abstract, that is, less true, than the implicit "faith" which they
assailed. The central truths of religion have often proved themselves to
possess some stubborn, though semi-articulate power, which could
ultimately overcome or subordinate the more partial and explicit truths
of abstract science. It is this that gives plausibility to the idea,
that the testimony of the heart is more reliable than that of the
intellect. But, in this case also, it was really reason that triumphed.
It was the truth which proved itself to be immortal, and not any mere
emotion. The insurrection of the intellect against the heart is quelled,
only when the untruth, or abstract character, of the principle of the
assailants has been made manifest, and when the old faith has yielded up
its unjust gains, and proved its vitality and strength by absorbing the
truth that gave vigour to the attack. Just as in morality it is the
ideal, or the unity of the whole moral life, that breaks up into
differences, so also here it is the implicit faith which, as it grows,
breaks forth into doubts. In both cases alike, the negative movement
which induces despair, is only a phase of a positive process--the
process of reason towards a fuller, a more articulate and complex,
realization of itself.

Hence it follows that the value and strength of a faith corresponds
accurately to the doubts it has overcome. Those