resent consequences
and the immediately feasible. There is nothing in the mere dread of
losing it, to hinder influence from being well employed, so far as it
goes. But one can hardly overrate the ill consequences of this
particular kind of management, this unspoken bargaining with the little
circle of his fellows which constitutes the world of a man. If he may
retain his place among them as preacher or teacher, he is willing to
forego his birthright of free explanation; he consents to be blind to
the duty which attaches to every intelligent man of having some clear
ideas, even though only provisional ones, upon the greatest subjects of
human interest, and of deliberately preferring these, whatever they may
be, to their opposites. Either an individual or a community is fatally
dwarfed by any such limitation of the field in which one is free to use
his mind. For it is a limitation, not prescribed by absorption in one
set of subjects rather than another, nor by insufficient preparation for
the discussion of certain subjects, nor by indolence nor incuriousness,
but solely by apprehension of the conclusions to which such use of the
mind might bring the too courageous seeker. If there were no other ill
effect, this kind of limitation would at least have the radical
disadvantage of dulling the edge of responsibility, of deadening the
sharp sense of personal answerableness either to a God, or to society,
or to a man's own conscience and intellectual self-respect.

How momentous a disadvantage this is, we can best know by contemplating
the characters which have sometimes lighted up the old times. Men were
then devoutly persuaded that their eternal salvation depended on their
having true beliefs. Any slackness in finding out which beliefs are the
true ones would have to be answered for before the throne of Almighty
God, at the sure risk and peril of everlasting damnation. To what
quarter in the large historic firmament can we turn our eyes with such
certainty of being stirred and elevated, of thinking better of human
life and the worth of those who have been most deeply penetrated by its
seriousness, as to the annals of the intrepid spirits whom the
protestant doctrine of indefeasible personal responsibility brought to
the front in Germany in the sixteenth century, and in England and
Scotland in the seventeenth? It is not their fanaticism, still less is
it their theology, which makes the great Puritan chiefs of England and
the st