and truthfulness and coherency quick and wakeful among us?  Because so many people, even among those who might be expected to know better, insist on the futile attempt to reconcile all those courses, instead of fixing on one and steadily abiding in it.  They speak as if they affirmed, and they act as if they denied, and in their hearts they cherish a slovenly sort of suspicion that we can neither deny nor affirm.  It may be said that this comes to much the same thing as if they had formally decided in the last or neutral sense.  It is not so.  This illegitimate union of three contradictories fritters character away, breaks it up into discordant parts, and dissolves into mercurial fluidity that leavening sincerity and free and cheerful boldness, which come of harmonious principles of faith and action, and without which men can never walk as confident lovers of justice and truth.

Ambrose’s famous saying, that ’it hath not pleased the Lord to give his people salvation in dialectic,’ has a profound meaning far beyond its application to theology.  It is deeply true that our ruling convictions are less the product of ratiocination than of sympathy, imagination, usage, tradition.  But from this it does not follow that the reasoning faculties are to be further discouraged.  On the contrary, just because the other elements are so strong that they can be trusted to take care of themselves, it is expedient to give special countenance to the intellectual habits, which alone can check and rectify the constantly aberrating tendencies of sentiment on the one side, and custom on the other.  This remark brings us to another type, of whom it is not irrelevant to speak shortly in this place.  The consequences of the strength of the political spirit are not all direct, nor does its strength by any means spring solely from its indulgence to the less respectable elements of character, such as languor, extreme pliableness, superficiality.  On the contrary, it has an indirect influence in removing the only effective restraint on the excesses of some qualities which, when duly directed and limited, are among the most precious parts of our mental constitution.  The political spirit is the great force in throwing love of truth and accurate reasoning into a secondary place.  The evil does not stop here.  This achievement has indirectly countenanced the postponement of intellectual methods, and the diminution of the sense of intellectual responsibility, by a school that is anything rather than political.

Theology has borrowed, and coloured for her own use, the principles which were first brought into vogue in politics.  If in the one field it is the fashion to consider convenience first and truth second, in the other there is a corresponding fashion of placing truth second and emotional comfort first.  If there are some who compromise their real opinions, or the chance of reaching truth, for the sake of gain, there are far more who shrink from giving their intelligence