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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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Untitled Article
ance in question , but to lay down rules , thus suggested to
us , for future guidance . Such are the steps , as I have remarked before , by which science , in all her single branches , makes her progress ; — why should not the general science of truth be advanced by the same arts ?
To give this subject effective treatment , it would be necessary so assume certain facts for truth , sudh as no one , however , would be found to refuse us . Before we could proceed to illustrate the manner in which
certain passions have arrayed themselves against truth in particular cases , we must have it acknowledged that that was actually the truth which they were found to resist . This
would prevent any successful agitation of the question , if we were obliged to take our station at once on ground occupied by living * interests . But
by throwing our inquiry far enough back in the first instance , we should escape this objection , and we should gain that foot of land coveted by Archimedes , and would not
need to despair of moving the rest of our world . None would probably dispute with us , for example , whether the doctrines of Jesus Christ were wrongfully resisted by the old world . Take it then for a fact , that the
Christian law was wrongfully resisted , and that its gentle promulgator was cruelly and infamously persecuted . Couple that fact with another , which also , perhaps , there is no one
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hardy enough to question , viz ., that if Jesus Christ were at this day again to enter human shape ( as some hold for a certain and near event ) he would again foe denied—again be persecutednay , in spite of our horrot of the ancient Jews , perhaps again be sacrificed to the fury
of an incredulous age ! Yes , at intervals of a thousand years or so , we find a nation recognizes and worships its prophet ; but what it has eyes for there , it can by no means see at an ordinary convenient distance .
Why is this ? What are the passions here arrayed against truth ? How do they operate ? How do they become conciliated ? These are surely questions deserving the attention of
a philosophical writer . That Galileo was in the right , though one , his enemies in the wrong , though a million , none will now gainsay . Here then is leverage again . In the person of Galileo , truth , it is allowed *
was again a sufferer , again a martyr , but a martyr to other passions . These , then , we are desirous to see , not rhetoricall y flourished forth to us , with nothing discriminate or defined , from the round mouth of some
historian sublimely general , but truly and well explained , because deeply studied , by one able to deal with the highest moral questions . To descend to ordinary life , we observe in others , ^ nd all men of candid discernment
observe in themselves , that there are certain truths- —truths ultimately acknowledged for such ,
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Of the Sufferings < yf Truth . 119
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Aug. 1, 1837, page 119, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1834/page/47/
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