It is natural to desire a few firm and unshakable beliefs. If we
can only formulate the eternal verities and tuck them away in
pigeon-holes ready to our hand when wanted, we feel a certain
sense of security. To run the fundamental principles into
molds and have them forever after in cast-iron rigidity and
indestructibility is surely, we imagine, a consummation devoutly
to be wished.
But soon we encounter unexpected and vexatious and puzzling
difficulties. Truth has a way of losing its trueness by the very
act of being exprest. Exprest, or squeezed out, it does, indeed,
too often become; and nothing but an empty husk, a hollow form,
remains. How often one has the vaguely haunting and curiously
baffling sense that, if one were to say a certain thing, that
thing would immediately cease to be so; and, that if one had
only refrained from a certain other utterance, the thought
intended would not have lost, so unaccountably, its quality of
truth! In other words, how many times does truth show itself
to be of a nature quite too shy to be caught and tamed, too
slippery to be grasped, too elusive to be held fast! To take a
homely illustration, Mrs. Smith says to Mrs. Brown, “I am more
polite than you,” and straightway an assertion that might have
been true, if unuttered, becomes glaringly false. An able lawyer
was once arguing a case in court when the judge interrupted
him by declaring, “That is not the law.” “It was the law, your
Honor, until your Honor spoke,” was the two-edged rejoinder.
Some such ironical retort is constantly being flung back at us
by the inscrutabilities that we attempt to fathom. We know not
well (tho we are learning) the subtle ways they “keep, and pass,
and turn again.”
“Outworn creeds” is a phrase familiar to all. But why have we
so abundant a heritage of these cast-off garments? Is not their
undurability owing to the fact that truth is dynamic rather than
static? We must believe that at every instant of time something
is true; but that the same thing, stated just so and no
otherwise, is true for all time, is not so certain, and he who
depends on a fixt creed, of elaborate pattern, to bear him up
through all the stormy seas, is likely to find himself clinging
to a very poor life-preserver.--_The Christian Register._
(616)
=Crime and Playgrounds=--See PLAY AND MORALS.