broke away, having no confidence left
in God or priest or educated people or nobility or anything. No wonder
they made havoc. If you want to make a river dangerous, dam it up, keep
the waters back, until by and by the pressure from the hills and the
mountains becomes so great that it can be restricted no longer; and it
not only breaks through the dam, but bursts all barriers, floods the
country, sweeps away homes, farms, cattle, human beings, towns, cities,
leaving ruin in its path. Let rivers flow as God meant them to; and
they will be safe.

So let the world learn,-- learn gradually, and adapt itself to new
truth as it learns, and there will be an even and orderly march of
human progress. The danger is in our setting ourselves up as being
wiser than God, wiser than the universe, and doling out to the
multitude the little fragments of truth that we think are fitted for
their digestion. The impertinence of it, and the impiety of it!

I must not stop to deal with other reasons which lie in my mind this
morning. You can think along other channels for yourselves. I have
simply wished to suggest that, in the kind of world we are living in,
you may not be sure, at any particular age in history, that a set of
ideas is going to be accepted by the multitude merely because they are
true; and, because they are not accepted at once, you are not,
therefore, to come to the conclusion that they are not true. There
never has been a time in the history of the world when the truth was
not in the minority. Go back to the time of Jesus: do you not remember
how the people asked whether any of the scribes or the Pharisees
believed on him? They were ready to accept him if they could go with
the crowd; but it never occurred to them to raise the question as to
whether it was their duty to go with him while he was alone, as to
whether two or three might not represent some higher conception of God,
some forward step on the part of humanity. Consider for just a moment,
let it be in literature, in art, in government, in ethics, anywhere,
find out where the crowd is, and you will find where the truth is not.
Disraeli made a very profound remark when he said that a popular
opinion was always the opinion which was about to pass away. By the
time a notion gets accepted by the crowd, the deeper students are
seeing some higher and finer truth towards which they are reaching.

The pioneers are always in the minority. The vanguard of an army is
never s