PAPERS FOR THE TIMES, ON RELIGION, ETHICS AND CONDUCT. "Why wilt thou defer thy good purpose from day to day? Arise and VOL. I. BODL LONDON: E. W. ALLEN, AVE-MARIA LANE, PREFACE. This little volume has already in the serial form of its first publication-been subjected to some amount of public criticism and, it is satisfactory to know, has passed the ordeal, on the whole, with safety. Readers of it in that form will have discovered for themselves how far the design of its promoters, which is here briefly summed up, has been worthily fulfilled. A mere uniformity of doctrine will by no means be found in these pages. Even direct contradiction may, here and there, be discernable. Nevertheless, a general one-ness of purpose binds the writers together-that they are seekers after Truth. Their own individual opinions on various matters are, without doubt, sufficiently definite; but they endeavour to keep their minds free from prejudice against the acceptance of any others. While deprecating to the utmost instability of judgment and protesting, with all sincerity, against expressions of crude or hasty thought, it is yet true that these writers, not only make no attempt to secure a mere consistency of doctrine one with another, but, individually, do not bind themselves by creed, article or oath always to maintain the same theory of Truth which is theirs at present. Whatever seems to them most Truth-like is to them, for the time being, most true. Free-Thought, in the best sense, is essentially "inconsistent." Truth itself is eternal and unchanging but men's discernment of it varies from age to age and from year to year. The only worthy consistency is to Truth, not to the theories concerning it. To some, freedom of speech means little more than the right to say what one likes, and an organ of free speech is a mere miscellaneous collection of differing opinion. If every one has his say, it is supposed that, in some rough fashion, a sort of average of the whole may |