With their wings kept closely cropped by tradition and penned up inside their interpretative fences they are no longer adapted to the glorious liberty of the sons of God. They surrender love of truth for dogmatism and barter hope of grace for legalism. Removed from the main channel of religious thought where the current flows freely they drift into bayous and sloughs where they mistake stagnation for faithfulness and placidity for loyalty. In time they come to believe that the marsh is the stream and that to dry it up would be to destroy the river. But just as a swiftly flowing stream cannot be kept within the narrow banks of a pond so truth cannot be harnessed within the limited confines of a party.
Truth is dangerous to any party or faction.
It is well for factious men to keep it out if they would keep their partisans in. They will need to apply threat and boycott if they are to survive. Every party is built on reverence for the traditions of the fathers, therefore, has its own creed. The party exists on the basis that it has discovered, embraced and enclosed all truth. John Milton in his famous Areopagitica, published in 1644, points out that truth in our age is but dimly seen and imperfectly known.