It may in short be
a doctrine which is neither to be rashly accepted, nor rashly cast
aside, but one which may need to be guided, regulated modified,
according to time, place, and circumstance. I am not now called on so
much to estimate the practical good and evil of the doctrine as to work
out what the doctrine itself is, and to try to explain some difficulties
about it, but I must emphatically say that nothing can be more shallow,
nothing more foolish, nothing more purely sentimental, than the talk of
those who think that they can simply laugh down or shriek down any
doctrine or sentiment which they themselves do not understand. A belief
or a feeling which has a practical effect on the conduct of great masses
of men, sometimes on the conduct of whole nations, may be very false and
very mischievous; but it is in every case a great and serious fact, to
be looked gravely in the face. Men who sit at their ease and think that
all wisdom is confined to themselves and their own clique may think
themselves vastly superior to the great emotions which stir our times,
as they would doubtless have thought themselves vastly superior to the
emotions which stirred the first Saracens or the first Crusaders.
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