powers, and spiritual stupidity in high places--and when we are
ourselves partly weakened by the very influences against which we
are struggling?

But this is not all. There is in the way another difficulty.
Writing as the well-wishers of truth and goodness, we find, as the
world now stands, that our chief foes are they of our own
household. The insolence, the ignorance, and the stupidity of the
age has embodied itself, and found its mouthpiece, in men who are
personally the negations of all that they represent theoretically.
We have men who in private are full of the most gracious modesty,
representing in their philosophies the most ludicrous arrogance; we
have men who practise every virtue themselves, proclaiming the
principles of every vice to others; we have men who have mastered
many kinds of knowledge, acting on the world only as embodiments of
the completest and most pernicious ignorance. I have had occasion
to deal continually with certain of these by name. With the
exception of one--who has died prematurely, whilst this book was in
the press--those I have named oftenest are still living. Many of
them probably are known to you personally, though none of them are
so known to me; and you will appreciate the sort of difficulty I
have felt, better than I can express it. I can only hope that as
the falsehood of their arguments cannot blind any of us to their
personal merits, so no intellectual demerits in my case will be
prejudicial to the truth of my arguments.

To me the strange thing is that such arguments should have to be
used all; and perhaps a thing stranger still that it should fall to
me to use them--to me, an outsider in philosophy, in literature,
and in theology. But the justification of my speaking is that there