Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/221

Rh play, and cultivates that habit of equivocation, subterfuge, hairsplitting, and forced interpretation, than which nothing can be more disastrous in its influence on the intellectual life.

We do not wonder, then, that in the "ages of faith"—in the days when theology held undisputed sway—truth should have been so little prized, and falsehood, provided only it were falsehood in a good cause, held so venial. John Sterling's uncompromising words on leaving the priesthood—"No, I can not lie for God"—are very far indeed from describing the mental attitude of the early and mediæval Church. "By the fourth century" says Mosheim, "the monstrous and calamitous error" had taken possession of the ecclesiastical world, "that it was an act of virtue to deceive and lie when, by that means, the interests of the Church might be promoted" The history of the Church and councils, and of the growth of Christian doctrine, only too clearly shows to what extent this principle was put into practice. "This absolute indifference to truth" writes Mr. Lecky, "whenever falsehood could subserve the interests of the Church, is perfectly explicable, and was found in multitudes who, in other respects, exhibited the noblest virtue. An age which has ceased to value impartiality of judgment will soon cease to value accuracy of statement; and when credulity is inoculated as a virtue, falsehood will not long be stigmatized as a vice. When, too, men are firmly convinced that salvation can only be found within their church, and that their church can absolve from all guilt, they will speedily conclude that nothing can possibly be wrong which is beneficial to it. They exchange the love of truth for what they call the love of the truth" Thus, under the predominating influence of theology, men came to care more for creed than for veracity; and among the countless evils which followed as a matter of course, the habit of persecution sprang up and grew apace. Strictly logical, from the theological standpoint, this habit simply carried accepted principles over from theory into practice. In attacking opinions with the strong arm of civil authority, in punishing them with bodily torture, men merely treated the quest of truth as a social crime, when already it had been denounced as a religious sin.

So far as philosophical veracity is concerned, therefore, we have to conclude that its growth must depend almost wholly upon the decline of the theological and the spread of the scientific spirit. And, indeed, whatever else the expansion of science may do for men in the years to come, it is probably just in this extremely important