ERROR.
Who can understand his errors? cleanse thou me from secret faults.—Psalm xix. 12.
For the vile person will speak villany, and his heart will work iniquity, to practise hypocrisy, and to utter error against the Lord.—Isaiah, xxxii. 6.
Beware lest ye also, being led away with the error of the wicked, fall from your own stedfastness.—II. Peter, iii. 17.
A good that never satisfies the mind,
A beauty fading like the April flowers,
A sweet with floods of gall that runs combined,
A pleasure passing ere in thought made ours,
An honour that more fickle is than wind,
A glory at opinion’s frown that lowers,
A treasury which bankrupt time devours,
A knowledge than grave ignorance more blind;
A vain delight our equals to command,
A style of greatness, in effect a dream,
A swelling thought of holding sea and land,
A servile lot, decked with a pompous name;
Are the strange ends we toil for here below,
Till wisest death makes us our errors know.
Drummond.
Swifter than feathered arrow in the wind,
Than winged vessel on the yielding tide,
Than river shooting down the mountain side,
Than foot o’er champaign of the slender hind,
To error’s flowery vale, the headlong mind
Is prone, without a curb, to fly aside;
Neither by dangers of the path untried,
Nor roughest road, nor highest Alp confined.
But if the way of truth upon the right
It follows, like slow worm, or bird unfledged,
At every twig it checks, and stone, and rill.
Great guide! make strong my pinions for the flight
In that true course; by every other hedged,
And lift and bring me to thy holy hill!
From the Italian of Tarsia.
“But what is error?—Answer he who can!”
The Sceptic somewhat haughtily exclaimed:
“Love, Hope, and Admiration—are they not
Mad Fancy’s favourite vassals? Does not life
Use them, full oft, as pioneers to ruin,
Guides to destruction? Is it well to trust
Imagination’s light when Reason’s fails,
The unguarded taper where the guarded faints?
—Stoop from those heights, and soberly declare
What error is; and of our errors, which
Doth most debase the mind; the genuine seats
Of power, where are they? Who shall regulate,
With truth, the scale of intellectual rank?”
Wordsworth.
Thus error’s monstrous shapes from earth are driven;
They fade, they fly—but truth survives their flight;
Earth has no shades to quench that beam of heaven;
Each ray that shone, in early time, to light
The faltering footsteps in the path of right,
Each gleam of clearer, brightness, shed to aid
In man’s maturer day his bolder sight,
All blended, like the rainbow’s radiant braid,
Pour yet, and still shall pour, the blaze that cannot fade.
W. C. Bryant.
Error is a hardy plant; it flourisheth in every soil;
In the heart of the wise and good, alike with the wicked and foolish:
For there is no error so crooked, but it hath in it some lines of truth:
Nor is any poison so deadly, that it serveth not some wholesome use:
And the just man, enamoured of the right, is blinded by the speciousness of wrong,
And the prudent, perceiving an advantage, is content to overlook the harm.
On all things created remaineth the half-effaced signature of God,
Somewhat of fair and good, though blotted by the finger of corruption:
And if error cometh in like a flood, it mixeth with the streams of truth;
And the adversary loveth to have it so, for thereby many are decoyed.
Martin F. Tupper.