“I thought, and so did Schwartz, that the faith of Giestfacher must be peculiar when it could accept copies as good enough and true enough after we had discovered hundreds of palpable and grievous errors in them. A book of romance would do a person of Giestfacher’s temper as well as the Bible--faith being capable of making up for all deficiencies. I saw that an extravagance of credulity, called faith, on the part of Giestfacher, led to monomania; and a predominance of irrational reason on the part of Esch had led to utter negation. I did not covet either condition, and I concluded to remain safe at anchor where I had been before, rather than longer follow those adventurers in a wild career after a fancied good--a mere phantom of their own creation. I lost twenty-five dollars by the temporary madness. That cannot be recalled. I rejoice that I lost no more, and I am grateful that the hallucination which lasted nearly a year has passed away without any permanent injury.”
The remainder of Heuck’s statement had partially faded from the parchment by time and dampness, and could not be accurately made out. Sufficient was left visible, however, to show that he expressed a desire to be held excusable for whatever injuries to souls might result from the grave errors that existed in the Bibles disseminated by the cupidity of the scriveners with the guilty knowledge of such errors.
I interested myself in rescuing from oblivion such parts of the record of those curious mediæval transactions as served to show to the people of later times what extraordinary mental and religious activity existed in those ages, when it was foolishly and stupidly thought there were but henchmen and slaves on the one side, and bloody mailed despots on the other. The arrogance of more favored epochs has characterized those days by the epithet of “dark.” Pride is apt to be blind. The characterization is unjust. All the lights of science could not come in one blaze. The people of those days looked back upon a period anterior to their own as “dark,” and those looked still further backward upon greater obscurity, as they thought. The universal boastfulness of man accounts for this increasing obscurity as we reach back into antiquity. Philosophers and poets and men of learning, thinking themselves, and wishing to have other people think them, above personal egotism, adopted the method of praising their age, and thus indirectly eulogizing, themselves; and as they could not compare their times with the future of which they knew nothing, they naturally fell into the unfilial crime of drawing disparaging comparisons with their fathers. There is an inclination, too, in the imperfection of human nature to belittle what is remote and magnify what is near at hand. Even now, men as enthusiastic and conscientious and religious as Heuck and Giestfacher and Schwartz find themselves surrounded by the same difficulties, and as deeply at a loss to advance a valid reason for their revolt and their protest.