the matter a little deeply and carefully, you will become
persuaded that it would not be the best for us if we could. Men not
only wish to gain certain ends, but, if they are wise, they wish more
than that, to cultivate and develop and unfold themselves, which they
can only do by study, by mistakes, by correcting mistakes, by finding
out through experience what is true and what is false. In this process
of study and experience they find themselves, something infinitely more
important than any external fact or success which they may discover or
achieve.

So I believe that a similar thing is true in the religious life. It
might be a great saving of trouble if we were sure we had an infallible
guide. I am inclined to think that a great many persons who go into the
Roman Catholic Church, in this modern time, go there because they are
tired of thinking, and wish to shift the responsibility of it on to
some one else.

It is tiresome, it is hard work. Sometimes we would like to escape it:
we would like infallible guides. But I have studied the world with all
the care that I could; and I have never been able to find the materials
out of which I could construct an infallible guide, if I wanted it ever
so much.

Whether it is important or not to have infallible teaching in the
theological realm, there is no such thing as infallibility that is
accessible to us; and I, for one, do not believe that it would be best
for us if there were. God is treating us more wisely and kindly than,
if we were able, we would treat ourselves; because it is not the
discovery of this or that particular fact or truth that is so important
as is the development of our own intellectual and moral and spiritual
natures in the search for truth.

Lessing said a very wise thing when he declared that, if God should
offer him the perfect truth in one hand and the privilege of seeking
for it in the other, he should accept the privilege of search as the
nobler and more valuable gift, because, in this seeking, we develop
ourselves, we cultivate the Divine, and work our natures over into the
likeness of God.

And now at the end I wish simply to say that God has given us the
better thing in letting us freely and earnestly and simply investigate
and look after the truth, cultivating ourselves in the process, and
being wrought over ever more and more into the likeness of the divine.

And I wish also to say, for the comfort of those who may think that
this lack