who possess the common advantages of the social state; although by sophistry, by evil habits, by the neglect, false persuasions, and impostures of an anti-Christian priesthood joined in one conspiracy with the violence of tyrannical governors, the understandings of men may become so darkened and their consciences so lethargic, that a necessity will arise for the republication of these truths, and this too with a voice of loud alarm, and impassioned warning. Such were the doctrines proclaimed by the first Christians to the Pagan world; such were the lightnings flashed by Wickliff, Huss, Luther, Calvin, Zuinglius, Latimer, and others, across the Papal darkness; and such in our own times the agitating truths, with which Thomas Clarkson, and his excellent confederates, the Quakers, fought and conquered the legalized banditti of men-stealers, the numerous and powerful perpetrators and advocates of rapine, murder, and (of blacker guilt than either) slavery. Truths of this kind being indispensable to man, considered as a moral being, are above all expedience, all accidental consequences for as sure as God is holy, and man immortal, there can be no evil so great as the ignorance or disregard of them. It is the very madness of mock prudence to oppose the removal of a poisoned dish on account of the pleasant sauces or nutritious viands which would be lost with it! The dish contains destruction to that, for which alone we ought to wish the palate to be gratified, or the body to be nourished. The sole condition, therefore, imposed on us by the law of conscience in these cases is, that we employ no unworthy and heterogeneous means to realize the necessary end,—that we intrust the event wholly to the full and adequate promulgation of the truth, and to those generous affections which the constitution of our moral nature has linked to the full perception of it. Yet evil may, nay it will, be occasioned. Weak men may take offence, and wicked men avail themselves of it; though we must not attribute to the promulgation, or to the truth promulgated, all the evil, of which wicked men-predetermined, like the wolf in the fable, to create some occasion-may choose to make it the pretext. But that there ever was, or ever can be, a preponderance of evil, I defy either the historian to instance, or the philosopher to prove. "Let it fly away, all that chaff of light faith that can fly off at any breath of temptation; the cleaner will the true grain be stored up in the granary of the Lord,"—we are entitled to say with Tertullian:* and to exclaim with heroic Luther,"Scandal and offence! Talk not to me of scandal and offence. Need breaks through stone walls, and recks not of scandal. It is my duty to spare weak consciences as far as it may be done without hazard of my soul. Where not, I must take counsel for my soul, though half or the whole world should be scandalized thereby."+ Luther felt and preached and wrote and acted, as beseemed a Luther to feel and utter and act. The truths, which had been outraged, he re-proclaimed in the spirit of outraged truth, at the behest of his conscience and in the service of the God of truth. He did his duty, come good, come evil! and made no question, on which side the preponderance would be. In the one scale there was gold, and impressed thereon the image and superscription of the universal Sovereign. In all the wide and ever-widening commerce of mind with mind throughout the world, it is treason to refuse it. Can this have a counter-weight? The other scale indeed might have seemed full up to the very balanceyard; but of what worth and substance were its contents? Were they capable of being counted or weighed against the former? The conscience, indeed, is already violated when to moral good or evil we oppose things possessing no moral interest. Even if the conscience dared waive this her preventive veto, yet before we could consider the twofold results in the relation of loss and gain, it must be known whether their kind is the same or equivalent. They must first be valued, and then they may be weighed or counted, if they are worth it. But in the particular case at present before us, the loss is contingent and alien; the gain essential and the tree's own natural produce. The gain is permanent, and spreads through all times and places; the loss but temporary, and owing its very being to vice or ignorance, vanishes at the approach of knowledge and moral improvement. The gain reaches all good men, belongs to all that love light and de * Avolent, quantum volent, paleæ leves fidei quocunque afflatu tentationum ! eo purior massa frumenti in horrea Domini reponetur. De Præscript. advers. Hæretic. I. c. 3.-Ed. ↑ Aergerniss hin, Aergerniss her! Noth bricht Eisen, und hat kein Aergerniss. Ich soll der schwachen Gewissen schonen so fern es ohne Gefahr meiner Seelen geschehen mag. Wo nicht, so soll ich meiner Seelen rathen, es aergere sich daran die ganze oder halbe Welt. sire an increase of light to all and of all times, who thank Heaven for the gracious dawn, and expect the noon-day; who welcome the first gleams of spring, and sow their fields in confident faith of the ripening summer and the rewarding harvesttide! But the loss is confined to the unenlightened and the prejudiced-say rather, to the weak and the prejudiced of a single generation. The prejudices of one age are condemned even by the prejudiced of the succeeding ages: for endless are the modes of folly, and the fool joins with the wife in passing sentence on all modes but his own. Who cried out with greater horror against the murderers of the Prophets, than those who likewise cried out, Crucify him! Crucify him!—Prophet and Saviour, and Lord of life, Crucify him! Crucify him!—The truth-haters of every future generation will call the truth-haters of the preceding ages by their true names: for even these the stream of time carries onward. In fine, truth considered in itself and in the effects natural to it, may be conceived as a gentle spring or water-source, warm from the genial earth, and breathing up into the snow drift that is piled over and around its outlet. It turns the obstacle into its own form and character, and as it makes its way increases its stream. And should it be arrested in its course by a chilling season, it suffers delay, not loss, and waits only for a change in the wind to awaken and again roll onwards : I semplici pastori Sul Vesolo nevoso *Chiabrera Rime, xxviii. "But falsehood," continues Mr. C., "is fire in stubble; it likewise turns all the light stuffs around it into its own substance for a moment, one crackling blazing moment,—and then dies; and all its converts are scattered in the wind, without place or evidence of their existence, as viewless as the wind which scatters them." The simple shepherds grown bent and hoary-headed on the snowy Vesolo, are mute with deep astonishment, gazing in the overshadowed fountain on the Po with his scanty waters; then hearing of the honors of his confined and narrow urn, how he receives as a sovereign the ADDA and the TESINO in his course, how ample he hastens on to the sea, how he foams, how mighty his voice, and that to him the crown is assigned.' ESSAY IX. Great men have liv'd among us, heads that plann'd In the preceding essay I have explained the good, that is, the natural consequences of the promulgation to all of truths which all are bound to know and to make known. The evils occasioned by it, with few and rare exceptions, have their origin in the attempts to suppress or pervert it; in the fury and violence of imposture attacked or undermined in her strongholds, or in the extravagances of ignorance and credulity roused from their lethargy, and angry at the medicinal disturbance-awaking, not yet broad awake, and thus blending the monsters of uneasy dreams with the real objects, on which the drowsy eye had alternately halfopened and closed, again half-opened and again closed. This re-action of deceit and superstition, with all the trouble and tumult incident, I would compare to a fire which bursts forth from some stifled and fermenting mass on the first admission of light and air. It roars and blazes, and converts the already spoilt or damaged stuff, with all the straw and straw-like matter near it, first into flame, and the next moment into ashes. The fire dies away, the ashes are scattered on all the winds, and what began in worthlessness ends in nothingness. Such are the evil, that is, the casual consequences of the same promulgation. It argues a narrow or corrupt nature to lose sight of the general and lasting consequences of rare and virtuous energy, in the brief accidents which accompanied its first movements—to set lightly by the emancipation of the human reason from a legion of devils, in our complaints and lamentations over the loss of a herd of swine! The Cranmers, Hampdens, and Sidneys,-the counsellors of our Elizabeth, and the friends of our other great deliverer, the third William,—is it in vain that these have been our countrymen? Are we not the heirs of their good deeds? And what are noble deeds but noble truths realized? As Protestants, as Englishmen, as the inheritors of so ample an estate of might and right, an estate so strongly fenced, so richly planted, by the sinewy arms and dauntless hearts of our forefathers, we of all others have good cause to trust in the truth, yea, to follow its pillar of fire through the darkness and the desert, even though its light should but suffice to make us certain of its own presence. If there be elsewhere men jealous of the light, who prophesy an excess of evil over good from its manifestation, we are entitled to ask them, on what experience they ground their bodings? Our own country bears no traces, our own history contains no records to justify them. From the great æras of national illumination we date the commencement of our main national advantages. The tangle of delusions which stifled and distorted the growing tree, have been torn away; the parasite weeds, that fed on its very roots, have been plucked up with a salutary violence. Το us there remain only quiet duties, the constant care, the gradual improvement, the cautious, unhazardous labors of the industrious though contented gardener-to prune, to engraft, and one by one to remove from its leaves and fresh shoots the slug and the caterpillar. But far be it from us to undervalue with light and senseless detraction the conscientious hardihood of our predecessors, or even to condemn in them that vehemence, to which the blessings it won for us leave us now neither temptation nor pretext. That the very terms, with which the bigot or the hireling would blacken the first publishers of political and religious truth, are, and deserve to be, hateful to us, we owe to the effects of its publication. We ante-date the feelings in order to criminate the authors of our tranquillity, opulence, and security. But let us be aware. Effects will not, indeed, immediately disappear with their causes; but neither can they long continue without them. If by the reception of truth in the spirit of truth, we became what we are; only by the retention of it in the same spirit, can we remain what |