truth. We are all, I suppose, bigots to a greater or less extent.
We all have a creed written in our minds, or printed in our books;
and to this we are more or less blindly attached. We set down an
article of faith, or adopt an opinion, and nothing is allowed to
interfere with it. If a sturdy fact comes along, and asks
admission, we turn to our creed to see if we can safely entertain
it. If the creed says "No," we say "No," and the fact is turned
out of doors, and misrepresented after it is gone. Our creeds are
our dwellings. They come next to us, and nothing can come to us,
or go out from us, without going through our creeds. The simple
fact of the death of Jesus Christ upon the cross, reaching the
mind through various creeds, and passing out again, goes through
as many phases as there are creeds, ranging through a scale which
at one extreme presents a God dying to redeem the lost millions of
a world, and, at the other, a benevolent, sweet-tempered man,
yielding his life in testimony of the honesty of his teachings.

No new truth presents itself, which does not have to run the
gauntlet of our creeds. If it get through alive, and seem disposed
to be peaceable, and to remain subordinate to them, then we let it
live, and receive it into respectable society;--otherwise, we
entreat it shamefully. Sometimes the truth is too much for us, and
asserts its power to stand without our help, and then we
compromise with it. The world will turn on its axis, and wheel
around its orbit, though we stop the mouth of the profane wretch
who declares it; so, after a while, we get tired of fighting the
fact, and shape our creeds accordingly. We fight the sturdy truths
of geology, because they interfere with our creeds, but after
awhile the sturdy truths of geology become too sturdy for us, and
then we begin to patronize them, and to confer upon them the honor