There is the love of the good for the good’s sake, and the love of the truth for the truth’s sake. I have known many, especially women, love the good for the good’s sake; but very few, indeed—and scarcely one woman—love the truth for the truth’s sake. Yet without the latter, the former may become, as it has a thousand times been, the source of the persecution of the truth—the pretext and motive of inquisitorial cruelty and party zealotry. To see clearly that the love of the good and the true is ultimately identical is given only to those who love both sincerely and without any foreign ends.
S. T. Coleridge (Table Talk).
The old creeds grew out of human nature as genuinely as weeds and flowers out of the earth. It is well enough that the gardener, whose business it is to pull them up, should despise them as pigweed, wormwood, chickweed, shadblossom: so they are, out of their place; but the botanist picks up the same and recognizes them as Ambrosia, Stellaria, Amelanchier, Amaranth. Natura nihil agit frustra. Let us coax each to yield its last bud.
Moncure D. Conway.
I have not Conway’s book An Earthward Pilgrimage to refer to. The latter part of the above is apparently a quotation from Thoreau, as I remember it is so quoted by Emerson.
God is my witness, what hours of wretchedness I have spent at times, while reading the Bible devoutly from day to day, and reverencing every word of it as the Word of God, when petty contradictions met me which seemed to my reason to conflict with the notion of the absolute historical veracity of every part of Scripture, and which, as I felt, in the study of any other book we should honestly treat as errors or mis-statements, without in the least detracting from the real value of the book! But in those days, I was taught that it was my duty to fling the suggestion from me at once, “as if it were a loaded shell shot into the fortress of my soul,” or to stamp out desperately, as with an iron heel, each spark of honest doubt, which God’s own gift, the love of truth, had kindled in my bosom.... I thank God that I was not able long to throw dust in the eyes of my own mind, and do violence to the love of truth in this way.
Bishop Colenso (1814-1883) (Pentateuch).
(See G. W. Cox’s Life of Colenso, I, 493.) Colenso’s quotation, “as if it were a loaded shell,” etc., is from Bishop Wilberforce. Cox mentions elsewhere that in one of Wilberforce’s published sermons he speaks of a young man of great promise dying in darkness and despair, because he had indulged in doubt as to whether the sun and moon stood still at Joshua’s bidding! Who, that went through the experiences of those days, can ever forget them? We had been taught that we “must believe” every word of the Bible to be divinely inspired or else be eternally damned. And yet we realized that such belief was absolutely impossible!