CHAPTER XX.
“Ah, my son!” said the parson, “if I wished to prove the value of religion, would you think I served it much if I took as my motto, ‘Religion is power’? Would not that be a base and sordid view of its advantages? And would you not say, He who regards religion as a power intends to abuse it as a priestcraft?”
“Well put!” said Riccabocca.
“Wait a moment—let me think! Ah, I see, Sir!” said Leonard.
PARSON.—“If the cause be holy, do not weigh it in the scales of the market; if its objects be peaceful, do not seek to arm it with the weapons of strife; if it is to be the cement of society, do not vaunt it as the triumph of class against class.”
LEONARD (ingenuously).—“You correct me nobly, sir. Knowledge is power, but not in the sense in which I have interpreted the saying.”
PARSON.—“Knowledge is one of the powers in the moral world, but one that, in its immediate result, is not always of the most worldly advantage to the possessor. It is one of the slowest, because one of the most durable, of agencies. It may take a thousand years for a thought to come into power; and the thinker who originated it might have died in rags or in chains.”
RICCABOCCA.—“Our Italian proverb saith that ‘the teacher is like the candle, which lights others in consuming itself.’”
PARSON.—“Therefore he who has the true ambition of knowledge should entertain it for the power of his idea, not for the power it may bestow on himself: it should be lodged in the conscience, and, like the conscience, look for no certain reward on this side the grave. And since knowledge is compatible with good and with evil, would not it be better to say, ‘Knowledge is a trust’?”