useful in all cases save their own.  Nor is this a mere theory.  On the contrary, it is a fair description of an existing state of things.  We have the old disciplina arcani among us in as full force as in the primitive church, but with an all-important difference.  The Christian fathers practised reserve for the sake of leading the acolyte the more surely to the fulness of truth.  The modern economiser keeps back his opinions, or dissembles the grounds of them, for the sake of leaving his neighbours the more at their ease in the peaceful sloughs of prejudice and superstition and low ideals.  We quote Saint Paul when he talked of making himself all things to all men, and of becoming to the Jews a Jew, and as without the Law to the heathen.  But then we do so with a view to justifying ourselves for leaving the Jew to remain a Jew, and the heathen to remain heathen.  We imitate the same apostle in accepting old time-worn altars dedicated to the Unknown God.  We forget that he made the ancient symbol the starting-point of a revolutionised doctrine.  There is, as anybody can see, a whole world of difference between the reserve of sagacious apostleship, on the one hand, dealing tenderly with scruple and tearfulness and fine sensibility of conscience, and the reserve of intellectual cowardice on the other hand, dealing hypocritically with narrow minds in the supposed interests of social peace and quietness.  The old disciplina arcani signified the disclosure of a little light with a view to the disclosure of more.  The new means the dissimulation of truth with a view to the perpetuation of error.  Consider the difference between these two fashions of compromise, in their effects upon the mind and character of the person compromising.  The one is fully compatible with fervour and hopefulness and devotion to great causes.  The other stamps a man with artifice, and hinders the free eagerness of his vision, and wraps him about with mediocrity,—­not always of understanding, but that still worse thing, mediocrity of aspiration and purpose.

The coarsest and most revolting shape which the doctrine of conformity can assume, and its degrading consequences to the character of the conformer, may be conveniently illustrated by a passage in the life of Hume.  He looked at things in a more practical manner than would find favour with the sentimental champions of compromise in nearer times.  There is a well-known letter of Hume’s, in which he recommends a young man to become a clergyman, on the ground that it was very hard to got any tolerable civil employment, and that as Lord Bute was then all powerful, his friend would be certain of preferment.  In answer to the young man’s scruples as to the Articles and the rest, Hume says:—­

’It is putting too great a respect on the vulgar and their superstitions to pique one’s self on sincerity with regard to them.  If the thing were worthy of being treated gravely, I should tell him [the young man] that the Pythian oracle with the approbation of Xenophon advised every one to worship the gods—­[Greek:  nhomo pholeos].  I wish it were still in my power to be a hypocrite in this particular.  The common duties of society usually require it; and the ecclesiastical profession only adds a little more to an innocent dissimulation, or rather simulation, without which it is impossible to pass through the world.’[13]