compromise and conformity, but their application is a matter of endless
variety and the widest elasticity. The interesting and useful thing is
to find the relation of these too vague rules to actual conditions; to
transform them into practical guides and real interpreters of what is
right and best in thought and conduct, in a special and definite kind of
emergency. According to the current assumptions of the writer and the
preacher, the one commanding law is that men should cling to truth and
right, if the very heavens fall. In principle this is universally
accepted. To the partisans of authority and tradition it is as much a
commonplace as to the partisans of the most absolute and unflinching
rationalism. Yet in practice all schools alike are forced to admit the
necessity of a measure of accommodation in the very interests of truth
itself. Fanatic is a name of such ill repute, exactly because one who
deserves to be called by it injures good causes by refusing timely and
harmless concession; by irritating prejudices that a wiser way of urging
his own opinion might have turned aside; by making no allowances,
respecting no motives, and recognising none of those qualifying
principles, which are nothing less than necessary to make his own
principle true and fitting in a given society. The interesting question
in connection with compromise obviously turns upon the placing of the
boundary that divides wise suspense in forming opinions, wise reserve in
expressing them, and wise tardiness in trying to realise them, from
unavowed disingenuousness and self-illusion, from voluntary
dissimulation, and from indolence and pusillanimity. These are the three
departments or provinces of compromise. Our subject is a question of
boundaries.[1] And this question, being mainly one of time and
circumstance, may be most satisfactorily discussed in relation to the
time and the circumstances which we know best, or at least whose
deficiencies and requirements are most pressingly visible to us.