Fortunately there have always been men whose larger minds could adapt themselves to the truth instead of narrowing the truth to them. In William Penn's "No Cross No Crown," one-half the pages are devoted to the religious testimony of Christians, and one-half to that of the non-Christian world. The writings of the most learned of English Catholics, Digby, are a treasure-house of ancient religion, and the conflict between the bigot and the scholar makes him deliciously inconsistent. He states a doctrine, illustrates it from the schoolmen or the fathers, proudly claims it as being monopolized by the Christian church, and ends by citing a parallel passage from Plato or Æschylus! "The ancient poets," he declares, "seem never to have conceived the idea of a spirit of resignation which would sanctify calamity;" and accordingly he quotes Aristotle's assertion, that "suffering becomes beautiful when any one bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility, but through greatness of mind." "There is not a passage in the classics," he declares, "which recognizes the beauty of holiness and Christian mildness;" and in the next breath he remarks, that Homer's description of Patroclus furnishes "language which might convey an idea of that mildness of manner which belonged to men in Christian ages." And he closes his eloquent picture of the faith of the middle ages in immortality by attributing to the monks and friars the dying language of Socrates, that "a man who has spent his life in the study of philosophy ought to take courage in his death, and to be full of hope that he is about to possess the greatest good that can be obtained, which will be in his possession as soon as he dies;" and much more of that serene and sublime wisdom. Yet all this is done in a manner so absolutely free from sophistry, the conflict between the scholar and the churchman is so innocent and transparent, that one forgives it in Digby. In most writers on these subjects there is greater bigotry, without the learning which in his case makes it endurable, because it supplies the means for its own correction.[H]