Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/508

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And now, last of all, as the writer bids farewell to this single lingering fellow-student, he cannot refrain from suggesting to so patient a friend one little thought more concerning the proof that has been given for the doctrine of these later pages of our discussion. “Possibly it is all false,” the fellow-student may say. “This fair picture of a Truth that is also Goodness, may be but another illusion.” Be it so, dear friend, if we have said nothing to convince thee. Perchance all this our later argument is illusion. Only remember: If it is Error, then, as we have shown thee, it is Error because and only because the Infinite knows it to be such. Apart from that knowledge, our thought would be no error. At least, then, the Infinite knows what we have attributed to it. If it rejects our ideal, then doubtless there is something imperfect, not about the Infinite, but about our Ideal. And so at worst we are like a child who has come to the palace of the King on the day of his wedding, bearing roses as a gift to grace the feast. For the child, waiting innocently to see whether the King will not appear and praise the welcome flowers, grows at last weary with watching all day and with listening to harsh words outside the palace gate, amid the jostling crowd. And so in the evening it falls fast asleep beneath the great dark walls, unseen and forgotten; and the withering roses by and by fall from its lap, and are scattered by the wind into the dusty highway, there to be trodden under foot and destroyed. Yet all that happens only because there are infinitely fairer