But
if it is right for those to whom it is intellectually
satisfying to adopt it, it is equally so for those to
whom it is not, to protest against it, until by this
process the whole mass of mankind gets gradually
leavened, and pushed a little further upon their slow
upward journey.
Catholicism is the more thorough. Protestantism is
the more reasonable. Protestantism adapts itself to
modern civilisation. Catholicism expects civilisation to
adapt itself to it. Folk climb from the one big
branch to the other big branch, and think they have made
a prodigious change, when the main trunk is rotten
beneath them, and both must in their present forms be
involved sooner or later in a common ruin. The movement
of human thought, though slow, is still in the direction
of truth, and the various religions which man sheds as he
advances (each admirable in its day) will serve, like
buoys dropped down from a sailing vessel, to give the
rate and direction of his progress.
But how do I know what is truth, you ask? I don't.
But I know particularly well what isn't. And surely that
is something to have gained. It isn't true that the
great central Mind that planned all things is capable of
jealousy or of revenge, or of cruelty or of injustice.
These are human attributes; and the book which ascribes
them to the Infinite must be human also. It isn't true
that the laws of Nature have been capriciously disturbed,
that snakes have talked, that women have been turned to
salt, that rods have brought water out of rocks.
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