"We ought," says the author of Ecce Homo, "to be just as tolerant of an imperfect creed as we are of an imperfect practice. Everything which can be urged in excuse for the latter may also be pleaded for the former. If the way to Christian action is beset by corrupt habits and misleading passions, the path to Christian truth is overgrown with prejudices, and strewn with fallen theories and rotting systems which hide it from our view. It is quite as hard to think rightly as to act rightly, or even to feel rightly. And as all allow that an error is a less culpable thing than a crime or a vicious passion, it is monstrous that it should be more severely punished; it is monstrous that Christ, who was called the friend of publicans and sinners, should be represented as the pitiless enemy of bewildered seekers of truth. How could men have been guilty of such an inconsistency? By speaking of what they do not understand. Men in general do not understand or appreciate the difficulty of finding truth. All men must act, and therefore all men learn in some degree how difficult it is to act rightly. The consequence is that all men can make excuse for those who fail to act rightly. But all men are not compelled to make an independent search for truth, and those who voluntarily undertake to do so are always few. To the world at large it seems quite easy to find truth, and inexcusable to miss it. And no wonder! For by finding truth they mean only learning by rote the maxims current among them." "Maxims and first principles," says Pascal, "are subject to revolutions; and we are to go to chronology for the epochs of right and wrong. A very humorsome justice this, which is bounded by a river or a mountain: orthodoxy on one side of the Pyrenees may be heresy on the other." "Let there," begs the Spanish President Castelar, "be no more accursed races on the earth. Let every one act according to his conscience, and communicate freely with his God. Let thought be only corrected by the contradiction of thought. Let error be an infirmity, and not a crime. Let us agree in acknowledging that opinions sometimes take possession of our understandings quite independent of our will or desire. Let us be so just as to be enabled to see even to what degree each race has contributed to the universal education of humanity."