No one will suppose that this is designed for the normal type of priest.  But it is well to study tendencies in their extreme catastrophe.  This is only the catastrophe, in one of its many shapes, of the fatal doctrine that money, position, power, philanthropy, or any of the thousand seductive masks of the pseudo-expedient, may carry a man away from love of truth and yet leave him internally unharmed.  The depravation that follows the trucking for money of intellectual freedom and self-respect, attends in its degree each other departure from disinterested following of truth, and each other substitution of convenience, whether public or private, in its place.  And both parties to such a compromise are losers.  The world which offers gifts and tacitly undertakes to ask no questions as to the real state of the timeserver’s inner mind, loses no less than the timeserver himself who receives the gifts and promises to hold his peace.  It is as though a society placed penalties on mechanical inventions and the exploration of new material resources, and offered bounties for the steadiest adherence to all ancient processes in culture and production.  The injury to wealth in the one case would not be any deeper than the injury to morality is in the other.

To pass on to less sinister forms of this abnegation of intellectual responsibility.  In the opening sentences of the first chapter we spoke of a wise suspense in forming opinions, a wise reserve in expressing them, and a wise tardiness in trying to realise them.  Thus we meant to mark out the three independent provinces of compromise, each of them being the subject of considerations that either do not apply at all to the other two, or else apply in a different degree.  Disingenuousness or self-illusion, arising from a depressing deference to the existing state of things, or to what is immediately practicable, or to what other people would think of us if they knew our thoughts, is the result of compromising truth in the matter of forming and holding opinions.  Secondly, positive simulation is what comes of an unlawful willingness to compromise in the matter of avowing and publishing them.  Finally, pusillanimity or want of faith is the vice that belongs to unlawful compromise in the department of action and realisation.  This is not merely a division arranged for convenience of discussion.  It goes to the root of conduct and character, and is the key to the present mood of our society.  It is always a hardy thing to attempt to throw a complex matter into very simple form, but we should say that the want of energy and definiteness in contemporary opinions, of which we first complained, is due mainly to the following notion; that if a subject is not ripe for practical treatment, you and I are therefore entirely relieved from the duty of having clear ideas about it.  If the majority cling to an opinion, why should we ask whether that is the sound and right opinion or the reverse?  Now this notion, which springs from a confusion of the three