DANGER OF ERROR. 79 



and hie contact with and knowledge of external reality, 

 will serve very little purpose to us if we have not learned 

 from them higher and better powers of discrimination 

 than we were aware of before we began the study in 

 which we have been engaged if we have not learned 

 that there are three great regions with which our responsi- 

 bility, our high and accountable moral life is in contact : 

 that there is a reality around us consistent, truthful, and 

 at least as stable as ourselves, in which the scene of 

 present life is cast, and in reference to which its duties 

 have to be wrought out in such a manner that it is of the 

 highest consequence we should so use and learn to know 

 our faculties and powers as not to be negligent nor allow 

 ourselves to be deceived that there is a coming reality 

 in futurity before us, after the limited present has passed 

 away, likely to demand for its experience a higher fitness 

 in point of intelligence, capacity, and purity for its 

 realization and that there is also a region present now, 

 and possible for ever, in which error, contradiction, and 

 confusion hold, and may continue to hold, that Saturnalia 

 of distortion and misrepresentation, wilfully deceiving and 

 being deceived the only chaos full of reaction and horror 

 which it is possible to imagine can be or ever has been 

 realised in an Eternity presided over by Divine and im- 

 maculate intelligence where will is free and moral action 

 a responsibility a very Hell from the intensity and the 

 perpetuity of its more than maddening incompatibilities. 

 Right and Wrong divide the universe by a clear, vivid 

 and unmistakable line ; on the one side of which is truth, 

 stable, sure and eternally trustworthy, and on the other 

 falsehood and interminable error a shifting quicksand, a 

 treacherous quagmire, blinding and betraying its reckless 

 victims the region of inextricable and fatal floundering- 

 of everlasting self-contradiction. 



In this age we are beset on all sides with dangers, and 



