"Every new idea," says a writer in The Quarterly Review, "creates an enthusiasm in the minds of those who have first grasped it, which renders them incapable of viewing it in its true proportions to the sum total of knowledge. It is in their eyes no new denizen of the world of facts, but a heaven-sent ruler of it, to which all previously recognized truths must be made to bow. As time goes on, truer views obtain. The new principle ceases to be regarded either as a pestilent delusion or as a key to all mysteries. Its application comes to be better defined and its value more reasonably appreciated, when both idolators and iconoclasts have passed away, and a new generation begins to take stock of its intellectual inheritance." "The truth," said Goethe, "must be repeated over and over again, because error is repeatedly preached among us, not only by individuals, but by the masses. In periodicals and cyclopedias, in schools and universities, everywhere, in fact, error prevails, and is quite easy in the feeling that it has quite a majority on its side." "Public opinion, of which we hear so much," said a writer in Blackwood, long ago, "is never anything else than the reecho of the thought of a few great men half a century before. It takes that time for ideas to flow down from the elevated to the inferior level. The great never adopt, they only originate. Their chief efforts are always made in opposition to the prevailing opinions by which they are surrounded. Thence it is that a powerful mind is always uneasy when it is not in the minority on any subject which excites general attention." "If you discover a truth," says an unknown author, "you are persecuted by an infinite number of people who gain their living from the error you oppose, saying that this error itself is the truth, and that the greatest error is that which tends to destroy it." "There arose no small stir" at Ephesus on account of Paul's preaching. "For a certain man named Demetrius, a silversmith, which made silver shrines for Diana, brought no small gain unto the craftsmen; whom he called together with the workmen of like occupation, and said, Sirs, ye know that by this craft we have our wealth: moreover, ye see and hear, that not alone at Ephesus, but almost throughout all Asia, this Paul hath persuaded and turned away much people, saying that they be no gods which are made with hands. So that not only this our craft is in danger to be set at naught; but also that the temple of the great goddess Diana should be despised, and her magnificence should be destroyed, whom all Asia and the world worshipeth. And when they heard these sayings, they were full of wrath, and cried out, saying, Great is Diana of the Ephesians."