1822 July 7.

Constitut Code Rationale

Established Religion none

Now as to the vitiation of the intellectual part of the mental frame /intellectual corruption/: and first as to the teacher of that which to him seems /in his eyes is/ falshood. So long as he believes to be false that which he asserts to be true, the poison remains in his moral frame and goes no further. But what may happen, and to a certain extent probably does happen is - that finding this state of mind more or less irksome, he uses his endeavours to get out of it. That which he believes to be false he endeavours to believe to be true For this purpose there is one and but one course. This on every occasion is to call off his attention from all considerations tending to cause the belief in question to be regarded as false, and at the same time to apply his attention to all considerations tending to cause it to be believed to be true: not omitting to set and keep his invention at work in the search of /after/ new ones. /additional ones./ Call this the self-deceptive process. In the here supposed case by the supposition the system is true: therefore as the particular /individual/ /one/ system or subject matter in question, no error, no vitiation of the intellectual frame is among the consequence. But in the mean time a habit has been acquired by him, a habit by which the intellectual frame is vitiated in its application to all subjects: the habit of partiality: the habit of artful blindness the habit by /from/ which a man derives a propensity to embrace falshood and error in preference to truth whatsoever be the subject.

Look once more to the Westminster Hall witness with the straw in his shoe. The side on which he has been engaged has happened to be the right side - in this there is nothing extraordinary: for a fact which in itself is true is not rendered false by the death of a witness who if alive would have proved it. The side on /in favour of/ which he has given his testimony has been /is/ the right side: but the immorality /vices/ by which his moral character has been stained is not the less gross. So is it with the priest who of the true religion in the case of the true system in regard to religion so is it with the priest who having when first hired believed it to be false, by the use made of that process which in its general effects is the self-deceptive process, came to believe it to be true, the difference and only difference that in this case the seat of the disease is not /no longer/ in the moral but in the intellectual part of man's frame: it has shifted from the one to the other.