THE RECONCILIATION. 125 



§ 34. These admissions will perhaps be held to imply, 

 that the current theology should be passively accepted; or, 

 at any rate, should not be actively opposed. " Why," it 

 may be asked, " if all creeds have an average fitness to their 

 times and places, should we not rest content with that to 

 which we are born? If the established belief contains an 

 essential truth — if the forms under which it presents this 

 truth, though intrinsically bad, are extrinsically good — if 

 the abolition of these forms would be at present detrimental 

 to the great majority — nay, if there are scarcely any to 

 whom the ultimate and most abstract belief can furnish an 

 adequate rule of life; surely it is wrong, for the present at 

 least, to propagate this ultimate and most abstract belief. " 



The reply is, that though existing religious ideas and in- 

 stitutions have an average adaptation to the characters of the 

 people who live under them ; yet, as these characters are ever 

 changing, the adaptation is ever becoming imperfect; and 

 the ideas and institutions need remodelling with a frequency 

 proportionate to the rapidity of the change. Hence, while it 

 is requisite that free play should be given to conservative 

 thought and action, progressive thought and action must 

 also have free play. Without the agency of both, there can 

 not be those continual re-adaptations which orderly progress 

 demands. 



Whoever hesitates to utter that which he thinks the 

 highest truth, lest it should be too much in advance of the 

 time, may reassure himself by looking at his acts from an im- 

 personal point of view. Let him duly realize the fact that 

 opinion is the agency through which character adapts exter- 

 nal arrangements to itself — that his opinion rightly forms 

 part of this agency — is a unit of force, constituting, with 

 other such units, the general power which works out social 

 changes; and he will perceive that he may properly give 

 full utterance to his innermost conviction : leaving it to pro- 

 duce what effect it may. It is not for nothing that he has in 

 him these sympathies with some principles and repugnance 



