Life.
TRUTH
What is wanted is the power of sifting evidence, and a simple love of truth. Whatever value we may attach to our own most cherished convictions, there is something more cherished than all of them, and that is a perfect trust in truth, if once we have seen it.
Last Essays.
True reverence does not consist in declaring a subject, because it is dear to us, to be unfit for free, and honest inquiry; far from it! True reverence is shown in treating every subject, however sacred, however dear to us, with perfect confidence, without fear and without favour; with tenderness and love, by all means, but, before all, with unflinching and uncompromising loyalty to truth.
Science of Religion.
Do we lose anything if we find that what we hold to be the most valuable truth is shared in and supported by millions of human beings? Ancient philosophers were most anxious to support their own belief in God by the unanimous testimony of mankind. They made the greatest efforts to prove that there was no race so degraded and barbarous as to be without a belief in something divine. Some modern theologians seem to grudge to all religions but their own the credit of having a pure and true, nay any concept of God at all, quite forgetful of the fact that a truth does not cease to be a truth because it is accepted universally. I know no heresy more dangerous to true religion than this denial that a true concept of God is within the reach of every human being, is, in fact, the common inheritance of mankind, however fearfully it may have been misused and profaned by Christian and un-Christian nations.
Gifford Lectures, II.