aring whatever upon the exercise of reason.

So much at first sight; but I will go on to say further, that,
in spite of all that the most hostile critic may say upon the
encroachments or severities of high ecclesiastics, in times past, in
the use of their power, I think that the event has shown after all,
that they were mainly in the right, and that those whom they were
hard upon mainly in the wrong. I love, for instance, the name of
Origen: I will not listen to the notion that so great a soul was
lost; but I am quite sure that, in the contest between his doctrine
and his followers and ecclesiastical power, his opponents were right,
and he was wrong. Yet who can speak with patience of his enemy
and the enemy of St. John Chrysostom, that Theophilus, bishop of
Alexandria? who can admire or revere Pope Vigilius? And here
another consideration presents itself to my thoughts. In reading
ecclesiastical history, when I was an Anglican, it used to be
forcibly brought home to me, how the initial error of what afterwards
became heresy was the urging forward some truth against the
prohibition of authority at an unseasonable time. There is a time for
everything, and many a man desires a reformation of an abuse, or the
fuller development of a doctrine, or the adoption of a particular
policy, but forgets to ask himself whether the right time for it is
come; and, knowing that there is no one who will do anything towards
it in his own lifetime unless he does it himself, he will not listen
to the voice of authority, and spoils a good work in his own century,
that another man, as yet unborn, may not bring it happily to
perfection in the next. He may seem to the world to be nothing else
than a bold champion for the truth and a martyr to free opinion, when
he is just one of those persons whom the competent authority ought to
silence, and, though the case may not fall within that subject-matter
in which it is infallible, or the formal conditions of the exercise
of that gift may be wanting, it is clearly the duty of authority to
act vigorously in the case. Yet that act will go down to posterity as
an instance of a tyrannical interference with private judgment, and
of the silencing of a reformer, and of a base love of corruption or
error; and it will show still less to advantage, if the ruling power
happens in its proceedings to act with any defect of prudence or
consideration. And all those who take the part of that ruling
authority will be