Young people, sincere people, impulsive people, and imaginative
people have all a common danger--that of being led astray by
false lights. Of these false lights there are many kinds--some
bewildering the intellect, others entangling the affections
in hopeless morasses, others again misleading the sympathies,
the imagination, the belief. But they all end in the same
thing--mischief, mistake, and a loss of way. To the young and
sincere--and the young are generally sincere, up to a certain
point--organized craft and falsehood are arts of which they do
not know the formula, foreign languages whereof they do not
understand the very alphabet. Appearances stand for realities,
and words are not so much symbols in themselves. They are able
to tell their own little white lies and act their own little
falsities, of a small and insignificant and, for the most part,
transparent kind; but they do not apply their own rules to the
grammar of their elders; and when those elders say so and so the
younger believe them, and when they show such and such lights
they follow them--in many instances to the same result as those
doomed ships which were deceived on the Cornish coast, at such
time as that, let us hope legendary, parson sent out his hobbled
horse on the cliffs in a fog, with a lantern fastened to his
fore-feet, to simulate the plunging of a ship in the sea. Then
said the sailing masters of those doomed and predestined ships:
“Where one vessel can go another may,” and so plowed their way
straight onto the rocks and into the hands of death and the
wreckers. So it is with certain false lights held out to the
unwary and ignorant.--London _Queen_.
(1052)