Perhaps the compromiser shrinks, not because he fears to march alone, but because he thinks that the time has not yet come for the progressive idea which he has made his own, and for whose triumph one day he confidently hopes.  This plea may mean two wholly different states of the case.  The time has not yet come for what?  For making those positive changes in life or institution, which the change in idea must ultimately involve?  That is one thing.  Or for propagating, elaborating, enforcing the new idea, and strenuously doing all that one can to bring as many people as possible to a state of theory, which will at last permit the requisite change in practice to be made with safety and success?  This is another and entirely different thing.  The time may not have come for the first of these two courses.  The season may not be advanced enough for us to push on to active conquest.  But the time has always come, and the season is never unripe, for the announcement of the fruitful idea.

We must go further than that.  In so far as it can be done by one man without harming his neighbours, the time has always come for the realisation of an idea.  When the change in way of living or in institution is one which requires the assent and co-operation of numbers of people, it may clearly be a matter for question whether men enough are ready to yield assent and co-operation.  But the expression of the necessity of the change and the grounds of it, though it may not always be appropriate, can never be premature, and for these reasons.  The fact of a new idea having come to one man is a sign that it is in the air.  The innovator is as much the son of his generation as the conservative.  Heretics have as direct a relation to antecedent conditions as the orthodox.  Truth, said Bacon, has been rightly named the daughter of Time.  The new idea does not spring up uncaused and by miracle.  If it has come to me, there must be others to whom it has only just missed coming.  If I have found my way to the light, there must be others groping after it very close in my neighbourhood.  My discovery is their goal.  They are prepared to receive the new truth, which they were not prepared to find for themselves.  The fact that the mass are not yet ready to receive, any more than to find, is no reason why the possessor of the new truth should run to hide under a bushel the candle which has been lighted for him.  If the time has not come for them, at least it has come for him.  No man can ever know whether his neighbours are ready for change or not.  He has all the following certainties, at least:—­that he himself is ready for the change; that he believes it would be a good and beneficent one; that unless some one begins the work of preparation, assuredly there will be no consummation; and that if he declines to take a part in the matter, there can be no reason why every one else in turn should not decline in like manner, and so the work remain for ever unperformed.  The compromiser who blinds himself to all those points, and acts just as if the truth were not in him, does for ideas with which he agrees, the very thing which the acute persecutor does for ideas which he dislikes—­he extinguishes beginnings and kills the germs.