the same side of it was continually turned towards the earth; and if it were connected with the earth by a rigid bar—­which, as he thought, would deprive it of power of rotation—­the relative aspects of the two bodies would remain unchanged.  He sent his views to the Times.  He appealed to the common sense of the world, and common sense seemed to be on his side.  The men of science were of course right; but a phenomenon, not entirely obvious, had been hitherto explained in language which the general reader could not readily comprehend.  A few words of elucidation cleared up the confusion:  we do not recollect whether Mr. Symonds was satisfied or not; but most of us who had before received what the men of science told us with an unintelligent and languid assent, were set thinking for ourselves, and as a result of the discussion, exchanged a confused idea for a clear one.

It was an excellent illustration of the true claims of authority and of the value of open inquiry.  The ignorant man has not as good a right to his own opinion as the instructed man.  The instructed man, however right he may be, must not deliver his conclusions as axioms, and merely insist that they are true.  The one asks a question, the other answers it, and all of us are the better for the business.

Now let us suppose the same thing to have happened, when the only reply to a difficulty was an appeal to the Astronomer Royal, where the rotation of the moon was an article of salvation decreed by the law of the land, and where all persons admitted to hold office under the State were required to subscribe to it.  The Astronomer Royal—­as it was, if we remember right, he was a little cross about it—­would have brought an action against Mr. Symonds in the Court of Arches; Mr. Symonds would have been deprived of his inspectorship—­for, of course, he would have been obstinate in his heresy; the world outside would have had an antecedent presumption that truth lay with the man who was making sacrifices for it, and that there was little to be said in the way of argument for what could not stand without the help of the law.  Everybody could understand the difficulty; not everybody would have taken the trouble to attend to the answer.  Mr. Symonds would have been a Colenso, and a good many of us would have been convinced in our secret hearts that the moon as little turned on its axis as the drawing-room table.

As it is in idea essential to a reverence for truth to believe in its capacity for self-defence, so practically in every subject except one, errors are allowed free room to express themselves, and that liberty of opinion which is the life of knowledge, as surely becomes the death of falsehood.  A method—­the soundness of which is so evident that to argue in favour of it is almost absurd—­ might be expected to have been applied as a matter of course to the one subject on which mistake is supposed to be fatal, where to come to wrong conclusions is held