3.  The assumed infallibility of the entire Scripture is a proved falsity, not merely as to physiology, and other scientific matters, but also as to morals:  and it remains for farther inquiry how to discriminate the trustworthy from the untrustworthy within the limits of the Bible itself.

* * * * *

When distinctly conscious, after long efforts to evade it, that this was and must henceforth be my position, I ruminated on the many auguries which had been made concerning me by frightened friends.  “You will become a Socinian,” had been said of me even at Oxford:  “You will become an infidel,” had since been added.  My present results, I was aware, would seem a sadly triumphant confirmation to the clearsighted instinct of orthodoxy.  But the animus of such prophecies had always made me indignant, and I could not admit that there was any merit in such clearsightedness.  What! (used I to say,) will you shrink from truth, lest it lead to error?  If following truth must bring us to Socinianism, let us by all means become Socinians, or anything else.  Surely we do not love our doctrines more than the truth, but because they are the truth.  Are we not exhorted to “prove all things, and hold fast that which is good?”—­But to my discomfort, I generally found that this (to me so convincing) argument for feeling no alarm, only caused more and more alarm, and gloomier omens concerning me.  On considering all this in leisurely retrospect, I began painfully to doubt, whether after all there is much love of truth even among those who have an undeniable strength of religious feeling.  I questioned with myself, whether love of truth is not a virtue demanding a robust mental cultivation; whether mathematical or other abstract studies may not be practically needed for it.  But no:  for how then could it exist in some feminine natures? how in rude and unphilosophical times?  On the whole, I rather concluded, that there is in nearly all English education a positive repressing of a young person’s truthfulness; for I could distinctly see, that in my own case there was always need of defying authority and public opinion,—­not to speak of more serious sacrifices,—­if I was to follow truth.  All society seemed so to hate novelties of thought, as to prefer the chances of error in the old.—­Of course! why, how could it be otherwise, while Test Articles were maintained?

Yet surely if God is truth, none sincerely aspire to him, who dread to lose their present opinions in exchange for others truer.—­I had not then read a sentence of Coleridge, which is to this effect:  “If any one begins by loving Christianity more than the truth, he will proceed to love his Church more than Christianity, and will end by loving his own opinions better than either.”  A dim conception of this was in my mind; and I saw that the genuine love of God was essentially connected with loving truth as truth, and not truth as our own accustomed thought, truth as our old prejudice; and