of subtile and intricate Axioms and Theorems, to save the practice of
the Church.' This is true of much else besides scholastic axioms and
theorems. Subordinate error was made necessary and invented, by reason
of some pro-existent main stock of error, and to save the practice of
the Church. Thus we are often referred to the consolation which this or
that doctrine has brought to the human spirit. But what if the same
system had produced the terror which made absence of consolation
intolerable? How much of the necessity for expressing the enlarged
humanity of the Church in the doctrine of purgatory, arose from the
existence of the older unsoftened doctrine of eternal hell?

Again, how much of this alleged necessity of error, as alloy for the too
pure metal of sterling truth, is to be explained by the interest which
powerful castes or corporations have had in preserving the erroneous
forms, even when they could not resist, or did not wish to resist, their
impregnation by newer and better doctrine? This interest was not
deliberately sinister or malignant. It may be more correctly as well as
more charitably explained by that infirmity of human nature, which makes
us very ready to believe what it is on other grounds convenient to us to
believe. Nobody attributes to pure malevolence the heartiness with which
the great corporation of lawyers, for example, resist the removal of
superfluous and obstructive forms in their practice; they have come to
look on such forms as indispensable safeguards. Hence powerful teachers
and preachers of all kinds have been spontaneously inclined to suppose
a necessity, which had no real existence, of preserving as much as was
possible of what we know to be error, even while introducing wholesome
modification of it. This is the honest, though mischievous, conservatism
of the human mind. We have no right to condemn our foregoers; far less
to lavish on them the evil names of impostor, charlatan, and brigand,
which the zealous unhistoric school of the last century used so