it to the base level of a collision with human curiosity, or with petty
and transitory interests. _Secondly_, Because it would have ruined
his mission; would utterly have prostrated the free agency and the
proper agency of that mission. He that, in those days, should have
proclaimed the true theory of the Solar System and the heavenly forces,
would have been shut up at once--as a lunatic likely to become
dangerous. But suppose him to have escaped _that_; still, as a
divine teacher, he has no liberty of caprice. He must stand to the
promises of his own acts. Uttering the first truth of a science, he is
pledged to the second: taking the main step, he is committed to all
which follow. He is thrown at once upon the endless controversies which
science in every stage provokes, and in none more than in the earliest.
Or, if he retires as from a scene of contest that he had not
anticipated, he retires as one confessing a human precipitance and a
human oversight, weaknesses, venial in others, but fatal to the
pretensions of a divine teacher. Starting besides from such
pretensions, he could not (as others might) have the privilege of
selecting arbitrarily or partially. If upon one science, then upon
all,--if upon science, then upon, art,--if upon art and science, then
upon _every_ branch of social economy, upon _every_ organ of
civilization, his reformations and advances are equally due; due as to
all, if due as to any. To move in one direction, is constructively to
undertake for all. Without power to retreat, he has thus thrown the
intellectual interests of his followers into a channel utterly alien to
the purposes of a spiritual mission.

Thus far he has simply failed: but next comes a worse result; an evil,
not negative but positive. Because, _thirdly_, to apply the light
of a revelation for the benefit of a merely human science, which is
virtually done by so applying the illumination of an _inspired_