“Is it not this ignoble confidence,
  Cowardly hardihood, that dulls and damps,
  Makes the old heroism impossible?"[A]

[Footnote A:  The Ring and the Book—­The Pope, 1848-1850.]

asks the Pope.  The stream of truth when it ceases to flow onward, becomes a malarious swamp.  Movement is the law of life; and knowledge of the principles of morality and religion, as of all other principles, must, in order to grow, be felt from time to time as inadequate and untrue.  There are men and ages whose mission is—­

                  “to shake
  This torpor of assurance from our creed,
  Re-introduce the doubt discarded, bring
  That formidable danger back, we drove
  Long ago to the distance and the dark."[B]

[Footnote B:  Ibid., 1853-1856.]

Such a spirit of criticism seems to many to exercise a merely destructive power, and those who have not felt the inadequacy of the inherited faith defend themselves against it, as the enemy of their lives.  But no logic, or assailing doubt, could have power against the testimony of “the heart,” unless it was rooted in deeper and truer principles than those which it attacked.  Nothing can overpower truth except a larger truth; and, in such a conflict, the truth in the old view will ultimately take the side of the new, and find its subordinate position within it.  It has happened, not infrequently, as in the case of the Encyclopaedists, that the explicit truths of reason were more abstract, that is, less true, than the implicit “faith” which they assailed.  The central truths of religion have often proved themselves to possess some stubborn, though semi-articulate power, which could ultimately overcome or subordinate the more partial and explicit truths of abstract science.  It is this that gives plausibility to the idea, that the testimony of the heart is more reliable than that of the intellect.  But, in this case also, it was really reason that triumphed.  It was the truth which proved itself to be immortal, and not any mere emotion.  The insurrection of the intellect against the heart is quelled, only when the untruth, or abstract character, of the principle of the assailants has been made manifest, and when the old faith has yielded up its unjust gains, and proved its vitality and strength by absorbing the truth that gave vigour to the attack.  Just as in morality it is the ideal, or the unity of the whole moral life, that breaks up into differences, so also here it is the implicit faith which, as it grows, breaks forth into doubts.  In both cases alike, the negative movement which induces despair, is only a phase of a positive process—­the process of reason towards a fuller, a more articulate and complex, realization of itself.

Hence it follows that the value and strength of a faith corresponds accurately to the doubts it has overcome.  Those who never went forth to battle cannot come home heroes.  It is only when the earthquake has tried the towers, and destroyed the sense of security, that