The above question is not a reference to the question of a small child sitting in the back seat of the family car on a family outing. Back when I was that small child that could have been a ’55 Chevy and I would have been in the back with my older sister and baby brother (if he wasn’t sitting in his Mom’s lap in the front seat with dad. Today the question might never come up because the kids in the back seat are too involved with either on-board or personal entertainment devices. How times have changed! Now that I have dated myself, on to the reader’s challenge. . .

The question is drawn from a portion of one of the statements contained in the following paragraph. The challenge is not to identify the source or date of the quote (that will be provided further down), but to identify the portion of the paragraph to which the question refers, and after a positive I.D., to consider the question. . . “A are we there yet?”

“Some things are true and some things are false. I regard that as an axiom; but there are many persons who evidently do not believe it. The current principle of the present age seems to be, “Some things are either true or false, according to the point of view from which you look at them. Black is white, and white is black according to circumstances; and it does not particularly matter which you call it. Truth of course is true, but it would be rude to say that the opposite is a lie; we must not be bigoted, but remember the motto, ‘So many men, so many minds.'”  The school of modern thought laughs at the ridiculous positiveness of Reformers and Puritans; it is advancing in glorious liberality, and before long will publish a grand alliance between heaven and hell, or, rather, an amalgamation of the two establishments upon terms of mutual concession, allowing falsehood and truth to lie side by side, like the lion with the lamb. Still, for all that, my firm old-fashioned belief is that some doctrines are true, and that statements which are diametrically opposite to them are not true,—that when “No” is the fact, “Yes” is out of court, and that when “Yes” can be justified, “No” must be abandoned.”

About the quotation. . .I found it as a result of connecting to a link provided at another blog that had used a different section of the same source for a blog post. That blog post is here. The quotation was taken from an address to college students by C.H. Spurgeon and published in the March 1874 edition of Sword and Trowel. The entire address is here.