No doubt history abounds with cases in which a false opinion on moral or
religious subjects, or an erroneous motive in conduct, has seemed to be
a stepping-stone to truth. But this is in no sense a demonstration of
the utility of error. For in all such cases the erroneous opinion or
motive was far from being wholly erroneous, or wholly without elements
of truth and reality. If it helped to quicken the speed or mend the
direction of progress, that must have been by virtue of some such
elements within it. All that was error in it was pure waste, or worse
than waste. It is true that the religious sentiment has clothed itself
in a great number of unworthy, inadequate, depressing, and otherwise
misleading shapes, dogmatic and liturgic. Yet on the whole the religious
sentiment has conferred enormous benefits on civilisation. This is no
proof of the utility of the mistaken direction which these dogmatic or
liturgic shapes imposed upon it. On the contrary, the effect of the
false dogmas and enervating liturgies is so much that has to be deducted
from the advantages conferred by a sentiment in itself valuable and of
priceless capability.[11]

Yes, it will be urged, but from the historic conditions of the time,
truth could only be conveyed in erroneous forms, and motives of
permanent price for humanity could only be secured in these mistaken
expressions. Here I would again press the point of this necessity for
erroneous forms and mistaken expressions being, in a great many of the
most important instances, itself derivative, one among other ill
consequences of previous moral and religious error. 'It was gravely
said,' Bacon tells us, 'by some of the prelates in the Council of Trent,
where the doctrines of the Schoolmen have great sway; that the schoolmen
were like Astronomers, which did faigne Eccentricks and Epicycles and
Engines of Orbs to save the Phenomena; though they know there were no
such Things; and in like manner that the Schoolmen had framed a number