The friend - v. 3 Author:Samuel Taylor Coleridge Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ft the danpu.s I have described, it would probably be fourioi that delusions springing from their own virtuous activity, were not the only difficulties to be ... more »encountered. Even after suspicion is awakened, the subjection to falsehood may be prolonged and deepened by many weaknesses both of the intellectual and moral nature; weaknesses that will sometimes shake the authority of acknowledged truth.—There may be intellectual indolence; an indisposition in the mind to the effort of combining the ideas it actually possesses, and bringing into distinct form the knowledge, which in its elements is already its own:—there may be, where the heart resists the sway of opinion, misgivings and modest self-mistrust, in him who sees, that if he trusts his heart, he must slight the judgment of all around him :-. there may be too habitual yielding to authority, consisting, more than in indolence or diffidence, in a conscious helplessness, and incapacity of the mind to maintain itself in its own place against the weight of general opinion;—and there may be too indiscriminate, too undisci- a sympathy with others, which by the mere infection of feeling will subdue the reason. —There must be a weakness in dejection to him who thinks, with sadness, if his faith be pure, bow gross is the error of the multitude, and that multitude how vast:—a reluctance to embrace a creed that excludes so many whom he loves, so many whom his youth has revered:—a difficulty to his understanding to believe that those whom he knows to be, in much that is good and honourable, his superiors, can be beneath him in this which is the most important of all:—a sympathy pleading importunately at his heart to descend to the fellowship of his brothers, and to take their faith and wisdom for his own.—How often, when under the impu...« less