to our powers of observation, to our faculties for judging, to the extent of our knowledge, and it may well be questioned if pure truth can be comprehended by us at all.1 What is commonly called truth is not truth pure and simple, but truth with more or less of an admixture of error; nor, on the other hand, can there be error without more or less of an admixture of truth, otherwise it could not for a moment obtain a place in any human breast;" for there is a natural affinity to truth in man which leads him to seek for and embrace it, while falsehood

more adapted to the needs of the time, than that which it displaces."— (J. S. MILL: Liberty.)

1 "I suppose that truth absolutely pure and perfect can dwell only in the divine mind. To lodge it in the mind of a creature exactly as it is in the mind of the Creator may very probably be an impossibility. . . . It is a true maxim of the schools that whatever is received is received according to the capacity of the receiver. This maxim applies to a divine communication as well as to other things." (Dr. CANDLISH: Reason and Revelation.) "There is a line which no created understanding can pass, and whatever faculties are given to a being must necessarily be confined within certain limits, and their operations proportioned to their essential state, according to the maxim in philosophy that what is received is proportioned to the capacity of the subject that receives it." (Dr. J. ELLIS: On Divine Things.) "The truth of which our finite minds are susceptible may, for ought we kno be but the passing shadow of some higher reality which exists only in the infinite intelligence."-(MANSEL: Bampton Lectures.) "In this earthly state we cannot behold truth in its native lustre; but while we are veiled with mortality truth must veil itself too, that it may more fully converse with us. . God accommodates truth to our weak capacities by embodying it in earthly expressions."-(Rev. J. SMITH: Discourses.) "The senses are the contingent conditions of knowledge; in other words, it is possible that intelligence, different from the human (supposing that there are such), should apprehend things under other laws, or in other ways, than those of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling; or, more shortly, our senses are not laws of cognition or modes of apprehension which are binding on intelligence necessarily and universally." (Prof. FERRIER: Institutes of Metaphysics.)

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2"It is only by an air of truth that falsehood pleases us; it is only through the measure of truth it contains that we can be seduced by it. Singular condition of our soul! We can neither bear to have all truth nor all falsehood; we want a little of the one to make the other go down.

We have a natural taste for the false, but we have also a natural want of believing the false to be the true."-(VINET.) "We too often forget that not only is there a soul of goodness in things evil, but very generally also a soul of truth in things erroneous.”—(HERBERT SPENCER.) All errors "have some truth, nay, they may even be said to be only truths out of place.-(VINET.) "All error is truth abused."—(PASCAL.) "Our most fatal errors are human errors; we must even allow that there is a truth at the root of each one of them; for they are hardly anything more than the tortuous prolongation of a stem that was originally straight."-(VINET.}

is ever repulsive to his nature.1 Hence the struggles that have so frequently disturbed and broken the peace of society have not been between truth and error, properly so called, but between truths comprising more or less of error, or errors containing more or less of truth.2 In all such cases truth has eventually nothing to fear; it is stamped with immortality, whereas error has the sentence of death written on its forehead.3 But error dies not till the truth which constitutes its life is taken out of it; while truth is not immortal so long as it is incorporated with error.

Con

"If he (man) embraces error, it so impinges on something in his nature, so fails to satisfy his wants, is so pernicious in its tendency or so violates great principles which he is constrained by the laws of his being to hold, that he is compelled to abandon it."-ALBERT BARNES.)

26 'My own conviction with respect to all great social and religious convulsions is the extremely commonplace one that much is to be said on both sides. I believe that nowhere, and at no time, any such struggle can take place on a large scale, unless each party is contending for something which has a great deal of truth in it."-(J. A. FROUDE: Short Studies.) "The best adherents of a fallen standard in philosophy, in religion, in politics are usually next in all good qualities of understanding and sentiment to the best of those who lead the van of the force that triumphs."(JOHN MORLEY.) "In moral questions we have no absolute error, but incomplete truth: truth exaggerated or ill-applied. . . . There are many errors in morals, and if we examine them closely, we shall, I think, see that they are so many stray truths which, like lost children, ask to be brought back to their mother. It is not in the power of man to invent a pure error; but as possessor of a truth, he displaces it, isolates, exaggerates, and exasperates it into becoming a falsehood." (VINET.) Lord Lindsay makes the observation, "that in every great argument in which truth is concerned, each side is half right and half wrong, or, to express this in other words, that the minds of men individually are so constituted as to apprehend only half the truth, when truth is presented them in the abstract: and the inference therefrom is that this must be in subservience to some general law ordained for a wise and beneficent purpose by God.” -(Progression by Antagonism.)

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Eternity and truth are inseparable, just as are error and decay. All that is true is eternal; all that is not eternal has but the name and the semblance of being."-(VINET.) "If there be a faith from of old, it is this, as we often repeat, that no lie can live for ever. The very truth has to change its vesture from time to time, and be born again. But all lies have sentence of death written down against them in heaven's chancery itself; and slowly or fast advance incessantly towards their hour.”—(T. CARLYLE.) Injustice and falsehood may be long-lived, but doomsday comes at last to them in French revolutions and other terrible ways." (J. A. FROUDE: Short Studies.) "The world ultimately works itself right on the great matters of truth; and truth in respect to its ultimate triumph has nothing to fear."-(ALBERT BARNES.) "Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so truth be in the field we do injuriously. to misdoubt her strength. Let her and

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tention, agitation, strife, are the means by which the true is separated from the false the former putting on life and immortality, the latter being swept away into oblivion.1 And as with the true, so with the right and the good-the opposition which they meet with in the world is the means of their development and progress. Christianity, as a part of the same great system, is developed and strengthened, amid trial, and difficulty and opposition.2

If we view this subject aright, we shall learn from it to be less impatient with error,3 and more lenient to faults as

falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth come forth the worse in a tair and open encounter ? " "Who knows not that truth is strong next to the Almighty; give her but room and do not bind her when she sleeps, for then she speaks not true."-(MILTON.)

"It is chiefly by the shock and collision of different and opposite prejudices that truths are gradually cleared from that admixture of error which they have so strong a tendency to acquire wherever the course of public opinion is forcibly constrained and guided within certain artificial channels marked out by the narrow views of human policy."-(DUGALD STEWART.) "In an imperfect state of the human mind the interests of truth require a diversity of opinions. Truth has no chance but

in proportion as every side of it, every opinion which embodies any fraction of the truth, not only finds advocates, but is so advocated as to be listened to."-(J. S. MILL: Liberty.) "Without incessant alternations of doubt and conviction, of assent and dissent, of seeking and finding, no error could be removed, no deeper understanding of truth attained."(RANKE: History of the Reformation.) "It will be a dreary day for the world when disagreements cease. -(Prof. MASSON.)

2 "The political and religious differences that exist among mankind are by no means to be deplored as unmitigated evils. They serve to awaken the nobler feelings of the soul, and to maintain attention to principles that might otherwise be forgotten. They stimulate the intellectual powers and impart an energy to all the faculties and to all the operations of the mind."--(Logic for the Million.) "So far from believing secession and schism to be evils, I am inclined to think that they have been productive of beneficial effects with respect to the ecclesiastical establishment, as well as to the more important interests of religion. I really believe it to be a fact that diversity of religious opinions and sects have promoted charity, and the more active and habitual exercise of the virtues of candour, meekness, and forbearance. Differences of

opinion in our own times with respect to the doctrines of religion and forms of worship, instead of being the cause of animosity or hatred, are looked upon as motives to forbearance and charity."-(Dr. SOMERVILLE: Life and Times.)

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"What is error? A man may err as regards himself or his circumstances; but does he ever err as regards God's purposes? Extend thy view. Each man fulfils his destiny, nothing more.' -(ANON.) A man can never do anything at variance with his own nature. He carries within him the germ of his most exceptional actions."-(GEORGE ELIOT.) Man "often does not attain his own, but he never fails to accomplish

they manifest themselves in others. We are apt to judge too harshly of faults." All the persecutions that have disgraced humanity may be traced to the making too much of faults. The more one knows of his own nature with its

God's purpose, even when his intentions are least for it, yea, when they are most against it."-(LEIGHTON.)

1 "Let a man make all allowance for other men, and leave none for himself. Hold yourselves to the highest morals, and all the excuses that you save by your economy give to your neighbours. Every excuse a man can make for himself is something taken from his manhood; and every excuse he makes for his fellow men is something added to his manhood."—(H. W. BEECHER.) "How often has it happened from our erroneous judgment of men that those persons whom we have wrongfully thought wicked were good and virtuous, with the misfortune of having fallen in evil days and evil tongues, and those whom we esteemed to be righteous were in truth no better than specious hypocrites, mere whited sepulchres, which appear indeed beautiful outwards, but within are full of uncleanness ?"-(Dr. JAS. SCOTT: Sermons.) "Let me, as an old man, who ought by this time to have profited by experience, say that when I was younger, I found I often misrepresented the intentions of people, and that they did not mean what at the time I supposed they meant; and further that, as a general rule, it was better to be a little dull of apprehension when phrases seemed to imply pique, and quick in perception where, on the contrary, they seemed to imply kindly feeling."-(FARADAY.)

2 "The man who prides himself on a hard head, which would usually be better described as a thin head, may, and constantly does, fall into a confirmed manner of judging character and circumstance, so narrow, onesided, elaborately superficial as to make common sense shudder at the crimes that are committed in the divine name of reason."-(JOHN MORLEY: Critical Miscellanies.) "Conscience sometimes leads Christian men to a sphere of uncharitable judgment. It inspires a high conception of what is right, and men take that conception as a rule by which to measure the conduct of their fellow men, without consideration of their organizations, without making allowance for their weaknesses, without sympathy with them."-(H. W. BEECHER.) "Nowhere has Puritanism done us more harm than in leading us to take all breadth, and colour, and diversity, and fine discrimination out of our judgments of men, reducing them to thin, narrow, and superficial pronouncements upon the letter of their morality or the precise conformity of their opinions to accepted standards of truth, religious or other. As if there were nothing admirable in a man save unbroken obedience to the letter of the moral law, and that letter read in our own casual and local interpretation; and as if we had no faculties of sympathy, no sense for the beauty of character, no feeling for broad force and full-pulsing vitality."-(JOHN MORLEY.) "On the whole, we make too much of faults. Faults? The greatest of faults I should say is to be conscious of none. Readers of the Bible above all, one would think, might know better. Who is called there 'The man according to God's own heart'? David the Hebrew king, had fallen into sins enough: blackest crimes; there was no want of sins."-(T. CARLYLE.) "I find not many of Jacob's sons more faulty than Judah; who yet is singled out from all the rest to be the royal progenitor of Christ."--(Bishop HALL.)

imperfections, of human nature with its tendencies to err, and of the course of nature with its impenetrable mysteries the more leniently will he be inclined to look upon faults.1

2

It is characteristic of an ignorant and narrow mind to look upon itself and those who think with it, as the sole repositories of truth and right. The wise man, on the other hand, knows that his wisdom has been of slow growth, that during its progress he has had to give up many views and opinions that he at one time tenaciously held; and mayhap has likewise had to adopt others that at one time he considered erroneous.3 Neither is he at all certain that he may not have to give up some of those that he now holds, and he is prepared to do so, as soon as he may see sufficient reason for it. The more he sees, and

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"What are faults, what are the outward details of a life, if the inner struggle of it be forgotten ?"—(T. CARLYLE.) “Since man is free, he may choose; since he may choose, he may be mistaken; he may suffer. I go farther, I say he must be mistaken and suffer, for he begins his journey in ignorance, and for ignorance there are endless and unknown roads, all of which, except one, leads to error."-(BASTIAT.) "Speaking of the scepticism of Hume, Henry Rogers says, "Charity, we think, may blamelessly make ampler excuse than the generality of readers have been disposed to make. One may suspect, considering its remarkably early uniform and inveterate character, that it had to do profoundly with the very structure of his intellect, and was ab origine far more involuntary than is generally the case."-(Encyclopædia Britannica, art. Hume.)

2 "I am scandalized," says one, "at some Christians who will not allow salvation to any man that is not within the visible pale of their Church, as if the Eternal Sun of Justice were eclipsed to all that are out of their narrow horizon." "There is much bigotry even in good men. They judge and condemn without inquiring, and act unconsciously in the very spirit of Popery."-(Rev. J. MILNE.) "It is the supremest conceit for one to assume his own disposition and temperament as the measure of other men, judging their conduct, not by the influences which the actor felt, but by the motives which the critic would have felt."-(H. W. BEECHER.) "Nothing is more striking than to observe in how many ways a limited conception of human nature, the notion of a one thing needful, a one side in us to be made uppermost, the disregard of a full and harmonious development of ourselves, tells injuriously on our thinking and acting." (M. ARNOLD: Culture and Anarchy.) "A truth may become an error when, being consecrated by habit, it opposes other truths, or when being only relative, it claims to be absolute." -(VINET.)

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By experience we learn gradually to be less positive in regard to details, and learn toleration for opinions which rest upon just the same evidence to others that ours do to ourselves.”—(J. D. MORELL.)

Every age has "held many opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false but absurd; and it is as certain that many opinions now general will be rejected by future ages as it is that many once general are rejected by the present." (J. S. MILL.) "The highly in