popular wave of opposition, and many of those who did, lacked the discretion a few years of experience in dealing with the prejudices of the times would have taught them that much more of the evil existing in the world is perpetuated by thoughtlessness, particularly among the masses, than by a deliberate purpose to commit a wrong. Although prejudices are not to be disarmed by soft words, nor truths bluntly spoken to be dependent for success on the silver tongues that utter them, there is a certain inward perception of human nature which sees in the masses a confused mixture of noble purposes and inconsistent vagaries, causing them to vacillate between the casual gleams of some rising star of millenial glory on the one side, and superstitious bigotry for some ancient relic of heathendom on the other, and gathers their unorganized impulses into a consciousness of the merits and demands of an idea which stretches beyond the present into a future that shall actualize our conceptions, thus reaching the intuitions when reason would reject it as a delusion.
Another tendency to neutralize the progress of a reform is that spirit of timidity in a certain class of persons who recognize its beneficent objects, which leads them to ignore it out of deference to the opinion that suggests the possibility of error because others have erred before them, and that the fallibility of human nature, out of charity for itself, should attempt nothing higher than it has been found able to attain, forgetful that it was under the inspiration of their own great thought that Galileo and Luther severally pressed forward to challenge the world to a
