This brings us directly to our immediate subject.  For such a man is the holder of a trust It is upon him and those who are like him that the advance of a community depends.  If he is silent, then repair is checked, and the hurtful elements of worn-out beliefs and waste institutions remain to enfeeble the society, just as the retention of waste products enfeebles or poisons the body.  If in a spirit of modesty which is often genuine, though it is often only a veil for love of ease, he asks why he rather than another should speak, why he before others should refuse compliance and abstain from conformity, the answer is that though the many are ultimately moved, it is always one who is first to leave the old encampment.  If the maxim of the compromiser were sound, it ought to be capable of universal application.  Nobody has a right to make an apology for himself in this matter, which he will not allow to be valid for others.  If one has a right to conceal his true opinions, and to practice equivocal conformities, then all have a right.  One plea for exemption is in this case as good as another, and no better.  That he has married a wife, that he has bought a yoke of oxen and must prove them, that he has bidden guests to a feast—­one excuse lies on the same level as the rest.  All are equally worthless as answers to the generous solicitation of enlightened conscience.  Suppose, then, that each man on whom in turn the new ideas dawned wore to borrow the compromiser’s plea and imitate his example.  We know what would happen.  The exploit in which no one will consent to go first, remains unachieved.  You wait until there are persons enough agreeing with you to form an effective party?  But how are the members of the band to know one another, if all are to keep their dissent from the old, and their adherence to the new, rigorously private?  And how many members constitute the innovating band an effective force!  When one-half of the attendants at a church are unbelievers, will that warrant us in ceasing to attend, or shall we tarry until the dissemblers number two-thirds?  Conceive the additions which your caution has made to the moral integrity of the community in the meantime.  Measure the enormous hindrances that will have been placed in the way of truth and improvement, when the day at last arrives on which you and your two-thirds take heart to say that falsehood and abuse have now reached their final term, and must at length be swept away into the outer darkness.  Consider how much more terrible the shock of change will be when it does come, and how much less able will men be to meet it, and to emerge successfully from it.