Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

CHAP. xi. Conclusion. 315
even might be the result. For if minds have accustomed
themselves to cling with this exclusive force to particular
points, and identify religion as a whole with them, who can
tell the effect of the revulsion which would take place,
could they be brought to doubt the truth of these ? For
men go from one extreme to another, and from reposing
the most absolute faith upon articles resting on small
evidence, rush into disbelief of those which rest upon the
strongest. And if so, who would in all cases wish to try
the experiment of a change ? Who but a philosopher with
out knowledge of mankind would, for the chance of a possible
advantage, endeavour in all cases to disturb even a cherished
error of the minor and pardonable class ? As if minor
errors were not sometimes even a safeguard against greater
ones; and as if an obstinate propensity of the human mind,
checked in one direction, would not run out in another ;
like a stream which, if you dam it up in one part, breaks
its bank elsewhere, and perhaps floods a whole district.
Nor is this propensity to over-estimate particular truths
or supposed truths confined to any one communion ; the
Eoman Catholic and the Protestant shows it alike ; most
sects and divisions of the Christian world have their favourite
tenets, which individuals identify with religion
as a whole,
and associate intimately and fundamentally with their
whole Christian prospects,
as if their life
spiritual and
sanctification were essentially bound up with them. They
seem to see in such special
tenets the source of all their
strength, their stay, encouragement, and consolation.
The history of the human mind, I say, shows this great
imperfection in it, that it is so much more able to appre
ciate smaller and particular truths, real or supposed, than
larger and fundamental ones. There is in the first place an
advantage in this respect, belonging to the former, in the
very circumstance that they are smaller ; they are more
easily grasped, and the whole heart embraces them, and
winds itself about them more completely.
There is in the
next place the stimulus of rivalry and contradiction, which
surrounds a peculiar and distinctive, and as such, an op
posed tenet, with a halo of its own, and invests it with an