It is the child's instinct-
-pardonable though mistaken. The natural man--whether the heathen
savage at one end of the scale, or the epicurean man of the world at
the other--has no such instinct. He will feel no anger against
falsehood, because he has no love for truth; he will be liberal
enough, tolerant enough, of all which does not touch his own self-
interest; but that once threatened, he too may join the ranks of the
bigots, and persecute, not like them, in the name of God and truth,
but in those of society and order; and so the chief priests and
Pontius Pilate may make common cause. And yet the chief priests,
with their sense of duty, of truth, and of right, however blundering,
concealed, perverted, may be a whole moral heaven higher than Pilate
with no sense of aught beyond present expediency. But nevertheless
what have been the consequences to both? That the chief priests have
failed as utterly as the Pilates. As God forewarned them, they have
rooted up the wheat with the tares; they have made the blood of
martyrs the seed of the Church; and more, they have made martyrs of
those who never deserved to be martyrs, by wholesale and
indiscriminate condemnation. They have forgotten that the wheat and
the tares grow together, not merely in separate men, but in each
man's own heart and thoughts; that light and darkness, wisdom and
folly, duty and ambition, self-sacrifice and self-conceit, are
fighting in every soul of man in whom there is even the germ of
spiritual life.
Pages:
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205