formula. They will lift up their hands at this quotation, so strangely
blind are we to the hiding-places of our own hearts, even when others
flash upon them the terrible illumination that comes of calling conduct
and motives by plain names. Now it is not merely the moral improbity of
these cases which revolts us--the improbity of making in solemn form a
number of false statements for the sake of earning a livelihood; of
saying in order to get money or social position that you accept a number
of propositions which in fact you utterly reject; of declaring expressly
that you trust you are inwardly moved to take upon you this office and
ministration by the Holy Ghost, when the real motive is a desire not to
miss the chance of making something out of the Earl of Bute. This side
of such dissimulation is shocking enough. And it is not any more
shocking to the most devout believer than it is to people who doubt
whether there be any Holy Ghost or not. Those who no longer place their
highest faith in powers above and beyond men, are for that very reason
more deeply interested than others in cherishing the integrity and
worthiness of man himself. Apart, however, from the immorality of such
reasoned hypocrisy, which no man with a particle of honesty will
attempt to blink, there is the intellectual improbity which it brings in
its train, the infidelity to truth, the disloyalty to one's own
intelligence. Gifts of understanding are numbed and enfeebled in a man,
who has once played such a trick with his own conscience as to persuade
himself that, because the vulgar are superstitious, it is right for the
learned to earn money by turning themselves into the ministers and
accomplices of superstition. If he is clever enough to see through the
vulgar and their beliefs, he is tolerably sure to be clever enough from
time to time and in his better moments to see through himself. He begins
to suspect himself of being an impostor. That suspicion gradually unmans
him when he comes to use his mind in the sphere of his own
enlightenment. One of really superior power cannot escape these better