persons using their minds freely, but guarding their conclusions in
strict reserve; the other of the illiterate or unreflecting, who should
have certain opinions and practices taught them, not because they are
true or are really what their votaries are made to believe them to be,
but because the intellectual superiors of the community think the
inculcation of such a belief useful in all cases save their own. Nor is
this a mere theory. On the contrary, it is a fair description of an
existing state of things. We have the old _disciplina arcani_ among us
in as full force as in the primitive church, but with an all-important
difference. The Christian fathers practised reserve for the sake of
leading the acolyte the more surely to the fulness of truth. The modern
economiser keeps back his opinions, or dissembles the grounds of them,
for the sake of leaving his neighbours the more at their ease in the
peaceful sloughs of prejudice and superstition and low ideals. We quote
Saint Paul when he talked of making himself all things to all men, and
of becoming to the Jews a Jew, and as without the Law to the heathen.
But then we do so with a view to justifying ourselves for leaving the
Jew to remain a Jew, and the heathen to remain heathen. We imitate the
same apostle in accepting old time-worn altars dedicated to the Unknown
God. We forget that he made the ancient symbol the starting-point of a
revolutionised doctrine. There is, as anybody can see, a whole world of
difference between the reserve of sagacious apostleship, on the one
hand, dealing tenderly with scruple and tearfulness and fine sensibility
of conscience, and the reserve of intellectual cowardice on the other
hand, dealing hypocritically with narrow minds in the supposed interests
of social peace and quietness. The old _disciplina arcani_ signified
the disclosure of a little light with a view to the disclosure of more.
The new means the dissimulation of truth with a view to the perpetuation
of error. Consider the difference between these two fashions of
compromise, in their effects upon the mind and character of the person