[Jan D. Hodge]

from Bill Lantry's post #224: "Some don't like to put down their thoughts, out of concerns they'll change tomorrow."


In Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, he reports this exchange between himself and Michael Welfare, one of the founders of the Dunkers. When Franklin suggested to Welfare that he defend the sect against scurrilous attacks by publishing the articles of their belief, Welfare responded:

. . . .When we were first drawn together as a society, it had pleased God
. . . .to enlighten our minds so far as to see that some doctrines, which
. . . .we once esteemed truths, were errors, and that others, which we had
. . . .esteemed errors, were real truths. From time to time He has been pleased
. . . .to afford us further light, and our principles have been improving, and
. . . .our errors diminishing. Now we are not sure that we have arrived at the
. . . .end of this progression, and at the perfection of spiritual or theological
. . . .knowledge; and we fear that, if we should once print our confession of
. . . .faith, we should feel ourselves as if bound and confined by it, and
. . . .perhaps be unwilling to receive further improvement, and our successors
. . . .still more so, as conceiving what we their elders and founders had
. . . .done to be something sacred, never to be departed from.

Sounds like wisdom to me.

Jan