Yes, it will be urged, but from the historic conditions of the time, truth could only be conveyed in erroneous forms, and motives of permanent price for humanity could only be secured in these mistaken expressions.  Here I would again press the point of this necessity for erroneous forms and mistaken expressions being, in a great many of the most important instances, itself derivative, one among other ill consequences of previous moral and religious error.  ’It was gravely said,’ Bacon tells us, ’by some of the prelates in the Council of Trent, where the doctrines of the Schoolmen have great sway; that the schoolmen were like Astronomers, which did faigne Eccentricks and Epicycles and Engines of Orbs to save the Phenomena; though they know there were no such Things; and in like manner that the Schoolmen had framed a number of subtile and intricate Axioms and Theorems, to save the practice of the Church.’  This is true of much else besides scholastic axioms and theorems.  Subordinate error was made necessary and invented, by reason of some pro-existent main stock of error, and to save the practice of the Church.  Thus we are often referred to the consolation which this or that doctrine has brought to the human spirit.  But what if the same system had produced the terror which made absence of consolation intolerable?  How much of the necessity for expressing the enlarged humanity of the Church in the doctrine of purgatory, arose from the existence of the older unsoftened doctrine of eternal hell?

Again, how much of this alleged necessity of error, as alloy for the too pure metal of sterling truth, is to be explained by the interest which powerful castes or corporations have had in preserving the erroneous forms, even when they could not resist, or did not wish to resist, their impregnation by newer and better doctrine?  This interest was not deliberately sinister or malignant.  It may be more correctly as well as more charitably explained by that infirmity of human nature, which makes us very ready to believe what it is on other grounds convenient to us to believe.  Nobody attributes to pure malevolence the heartiness with which the great corporation of lawyers, for example, resist the removal of superfluous and obstructive forms in their practice; they have come to look on such forms as indispensable safeguards.  Hence powerful teachers and preachers of all kinds have been spontaneously inclined to suppose a necessity, which had no real existence, of preserving as much as was possible of what we know to be error, even while introducing wholesome modification of it.  This is the honest, though mischievous, conservatism of the human mind.  We have no right to condemn our foregoers; far less to lavish on them the evil names of impostor, charlatan, and brigand, which the zealous unhistoric school of the last century used so profusely.  But we have a right to say of them, as we say of those who imitate their policy now, that their conservatism is no additional proof of the utility