Truth, honesty, outspokenness, are not so well established as virtues, that we can afford to subject them to discouragement.  The contrary course would be more for the general good in every way.  When the law is intolerant in principle, men will be hypocrites from policy.  You cannot train children to speak the truth if, from whatever cause, they have an interest in deception.  A repressive discipline induces a coarse outward submission, but cannot reach the inward parts:  it only engenders hatred, and substitutes for open revolt an insidious secret retaliation.  Those only that come under the generous nurture of freedom can be counted on for hearty and willing devotion.  If we would reap the higher virtues, we must sow on the soil of liberty.  Encourage a man to say whatever he thinks, and you make the most of him; for difficult questions, where the mind needs all its powers, there should be no burdensome ‘caution’ in giving out the results.

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[RELAXATION NOW PRESSING.]

The imposing of subscription has its defenders, and these have to be fairly met.  First, however, let us advert to the reasons why relaxation is more pressing now than formerly.

It is known that, among dissentients from the leading dogmas of the prevailing creed of Christendom, are to be included some of the most authoritative names of the last three centuries; our present formulas would not have been subscribed by Bacon, Newton, Locke, Kant; unless from mere pliancy and for the sake of quiet, like Hobbes.  If they had been in clerical orders, and had freely avowed their opinions as we know them, they would have been liable to deposition.  Yet the difficulties that these men might feel were far less than those that now beset the profession of our prevailing creeds.  The advances of knowledge on all the subjects that come into contact with the various articles, as received by the orthodox Churches, may not, indeed, compel the relinquishment of those articles, but will force the holders to change front, to re-shape them in different forms.  To such necessary modification, the creeds are a fatal obstacle.  On a few points, such as the Creation in six days, these have been found elastic.  The doctrine that death came by the fall has been explained away as spiritual death.  This process cannot go much further, without too much paltering with obvious meanings.  The recently-proclaimed doctrine of the Antiquity of Man comes into apparent conflict with man’s creation and fall, as set forth in Genesis, on which are suspended the most vital doctrines of our creed.  A reconciliation may be possible, but not without a very extensive modification of the scheme of the Atonement.  It is not necessary to press Darwin’s doctrine of Evolution; the deficiency of positive proof for that hypothesis may always be pleaded, as against the havoc it would make with the more distinctive points of Christian doctrine.  But the existence of man on the earth, at the very lowest statement, must be carried back twenty thousand years; this is not hypothesis, but fact.  The record of the creation and the fall of man will probably have to be subjected to a process of allegorising, but with inevitable loss.  Now, whoever refuses a matter of fact counts on being severely handled; it is a different thing to refuse an allegory.