To attempt to answer all these questions fully would be nothing less than to attempt a compendium of life and duty in all their details, a Summa of cases of conscience, a guide to doubters at every point of the compass.  The aim of the present writer is a comparatively modest one; namely, to seek one or two of the most general principles which ought to regulate the practice of compliance, and to suggest some of the bearings which they may have in their application to certain difficulties in modern matters of conduct.

It is pretty plain that an inquiry of this kind needs to be fixed by reference to a given set of social circumstances tolerably well understood.  There are some common rules as to the expediency of compromise and conformity, but their application is a matter of endless variety and the widest elasticity.  The interesting and useful thing is to find the relation of these too vague rules to actual conditions; to transform them into practical guides and real interpreters of what is right and best in thought and conduct, in a special and definite kind of emergency.  According to the current assumptions of the writer and the preacher, the one commanding law is that men should cling to truth and right, if the very heavens fall.  In principle this is universally accepted.  To the partisans of authority and tradition it is as much a commonplace as to the partisans of the most absolute and unflinching rationalism.  Yet in practice all schools alike are forced to admit the necessity of a measure of accommodation in the very interests of truth itself.  Fanatic is a name of such ill repute, exactly because one who deserves to be called by it injures good causes by refusing timely and harmless concession; by irritating prejudices that a wiser way of urging his own opinion might have turned aside; by making no allowances, respecting no motives, and recognising none of those qualifying principles, which are nothing less than necessary to make his own principle true and fitting in a given society.  The interesting question in connection with compromise obviously turns upon the placing of the boundary that divides wise suspense in forming opinions, wise reserve in expressing them, and wise tardiness in trying to realise them, from unavowed disingenuousness and self-illusion, from voluntary dissimulation, and from indolence and pusillanimity.  These are the three departments or provinces of compromise.  Our subject is a question of boundaries.[1] And this question, being mainly one of time and circumstance, may be most satisfactorily discussed in relation to the time and the circumstances which we know best, or at least whose deficiencies and requirements are most pressingly visible to us.