Cowardly hardihood, that dulls and damps,
Makes the old heroism impossible?"[A]

[Footnote A: _The Ring and the Book--The Pope_, 1848-1850.]

asks the Pope. The stream of truth when it ceases to flow onward,
becomes a malarious swamp. Movement is the law of life; and knowledge of
the principles of morality and religion, as of all other principles,
must, in order to grow, be felt from time to time as inadequate and
untrue. There are men and ages whose mission is--

"to shake
This torpor of assurance from our creed,
Re-introduce the doubt discarded, bring
That formidable danger back, we drove
Long ago to the distance and the dark."[B]

[Footnote B: _Ibid._, 1853-1856.]

Such a spirit of criticism seems to many to exercise a merely
destructive power, and those who have not felt the inadequacy of the
inherited faith defend themselves against it, as the enemy of their
lives. But no logic, or assailing doubt, could have power against the
testimony of "the heart," unless it was rooted in deeper and truer
principles than those which it attacked. Nothing can overpower truth
except a larger truth; and, in such a conflict, the truth in the old
view will ultimately take the side of the new, and find its subordinate
position within it. It has happened, not infrequently, as in the case of
the Encyclopædists, that the explicit truths of reason were more
abstract, that is, less true, than the implicit "faith" which they