Controversy: Honest Comparison of Beliefs
By A. P. V. H.
I present the following extract as worthy of notice in discussions, especially upon religious subjects. A. P. V. H. “I like controversy when it is thoroughly honest. I do admire to see two large and generous minds approach a subject from opposite quarters, and then to watch the new lights that flash over it, and show it in a thousand relations that were not obvious before. It lifts us out of the ruts of our sect and party, in whose treadmill we have been grinding all our lives, and mistaking it for the universe. But controversy with small minds is the smallest business that is done in this world. It slides inevitably into word-catching, and ends in personalities. The moment I saw a man consciously trying to put my language to a different use from what I had put it myself, I would stop short with him and say: ‘I am glad to compare ideas with you, but I have no time for word-catching.’ To say, as Dr. Johnson did, ‘I can’t furnish meaning and brains too,’ is not courteous. The only controversy that ever convinces the controversists is a friendly comparison of beliefs, each turning the other’s round, and viewing it under all the angles of reflection. It is not this sort of controversy, but fighting with word mongers, that Dr. Holmes must have in mind, ‘You know that if you had a bent tube, one arm of which was the size of a pipe stem, and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would stand in the same height in one as in the other. Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way, and the fools know it.’”—Rev. E. H. Sears.