For each generation since human thought first learned to formulate itself, and the Father of Philosophy, the "Master of them that know," shaped a mould for the vague, uncertain conceptions of men, hardly one has dared speak to the full its own conviction. Six thousand recorded years of struggle toward truth, six million it may be of unrecorded, and truth seeker and truth speaker alike have found themselves on the scaffold with the jeering' lips and mocking eyes of the faithful and unquestioning, their last tangible impression of the summary of truth for this side of the veil. Yet as each body of each martyr to truth has helped to bridge the chasm for other men to cross, the process of generations has made the way plain, clearer, and clearer, till to-day "a plain public road" is open to whoever chooses to follow its course. Tangled thickets of criticism, sloughs of questions, deep bogs of strange systems, will-o-the-wisps, leading their followers strange dances over stranger ground, yet through them all the firm path has held its place, and patient travellers have found the House Beautiful on the way and the Delectable Mountains and fair land of Beulah at the end.
It is probably inherited tendency, the caution acquired from ages of timid attempts to speak the truth belonging to the time, yet keep pace with dominant elements of opposition and oppression, that has made even the thinker of to-day chary of expressing his personal belief.—
