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must have gone through all the vicissitudes, and have been exposed to all the corruptions that appear to have attended it. I add, that we have the less reason to be surprised at this, or to doubt of it, since we see that very faith, which God himself came on earth to publish, which was confirmed by miracles, and recorded by divine inspiration, subject to the same vicissitudes, and the same corruptions.

ESSAY THE FOURTH:

CONCERNING

AUTHORITY IN MATTERS OF RELIGION,

SECTION I.

ALL men are apt to have a high conceit of their own understandings, and to be tenacious of the opinions they profess; and yet almost all men are guided by the understandings of others, not by their own, and may be said more truly to adopt, than to beget, their opinions. Nurses, parents, pedagogues, and after them all, and above them all, that universal pedagogue custom, fill the mind with notions which it had no share in framing, which it receives as passively, as it receives the impressions of outward objects, and which, left to itself, it would never have framed perhaps, or would have examined afterwards. Thus prejudices are established by education, and habits by custom. We are taught to think what others think, not how to think for ourselves; and whilst the memory is loaded, the understanding remains unexercised, or exercised in such trammels as constrain its motions and direct its pace, till that which was artificial becomes in some sort natural, and the mind can go no other.

Wrong notions, and false principles, begot in this manner by authority, may be called properly enough the bastards of the mind; and yet they are nursed and preserved by it as if they were the legitimate issue; nay they are even deemed to be so by the mind itself. The mind grows fond of them accordingly, and this mistaken application of self-love makes men zealous to defend and propagate them by the same kind of authority, and by every other sort of imposition. Thus they are perpetuated, and as they contract the rust of antiquity they grow to be more respected. The fact that was delivered at first on very suspicious testimony, becomes indisputable; and the opinion that was scarce

problematical becomes a demonstrated proposition. Nor is this at all wonderful. We look at original, through intermediate authority, and it appears greater and better than it is really, just as objects of sight are sometimes magnified by a hazy medium.Men who would have been deemed ignorant, or mad, or knavish, if they had been our cotemporaries, are reverenced as prodigies of learning, of wisdom, and of virtue, because they lived many centuries ago. When their writings come down to posterity, posterity might judge indeed of their characters on better grounds than report and tradition: but the same authority which showed them in a half light, screens them in a full one. Paraphrases and commentaries accompany their writings. Their mistakes are excused, their contradictions are seemingly reconciled, their absurdities are varnished over, their puerilities are represented as marks of a most amiable simplicity, their enthusiastical rants as the language of the most sublime genius, or even of inspiration; and as this is frequently done with much skilful plausibility, so it is always aided by the strong prepossessions that have been created in their favor. The first traditional authorities that handed down fantastic science, and erroneous opinions, might be no better than the original authorities that imposed them. But they were sufficient for the time; and when error had once taken root deeply in the minds of men, though knowledge increased, and reason was better cultivated, yet they served principally to defend and embellish it. Truths, that have been discovered in the most enlightened ages and countries, have been by such means as these so blended with the errors of the darkest, that the whole mass of learning, which we boast of at this hour, must be separated, and sifted at great expense, like the ore of a poor mine; and like that too, will hardly pay the costs.

It may sound oddly, but it is true in many cases, to say, that if men had learned less, their way to knowledge would be shorter and easier. It is indeed shorter and easier to proceed from ignorance to knowledge, than from error. They who are in the last, must unlearn before they can learn to any good purpose; and the first part of this double task is not in many respects the least difficult, for which reason it is seldom undertaken. The vulgar, under which denomination we must rank, on this occasion, almost all the sons of Adam, content themselves to be guided by vulgar opinions. They know little, and believe much. They examine and judge for themselves in the common affairs of life sometimes, and not always even in these. But the greatest and the noblest objects of the human mind are very transiently, at best, the objects of theirs. On all these, they resign themselves to the authority that prevails among the men with whom they live. Some of them want the means, all

of them want the will, to do more; and as absurd as this may appear in speculation, it is best, perhaps, on the whole, the human nature and the nature of government considered, that it should be as it is.

Scholars and philosophers will demand to be excepted out of the vulgar, in this sense. But they have not a just claim to be so excepted. They profess to seek the truth without any other regard; and yet the task of unlearning error is too hard for them. They set out in this search with the same prejudices, and the same habits that they who neglect it have, and they lean on authority in more cases than the others. If they improve and employ their reason more, it is only to degrade her the more; for they employ her always in subordination to another guide, and never trust themselves wholly to her conduct, even when authority cannot have the appearance of authority without her approbation. The task of unlearning error, and laying authority aside in the search of truth, is not only hard in itself, but it becomes harder still by two considerations, as it implies a self-denial of vanity, and of ambition. Scholars are ostentatious of their learning, and though he who has read much will not arrive at truth so soon, nor so surely, as he who has thought much, yet will he make a greater glare, and draw more admiration to himself. The man who accumulates authorities of philosophers, of fathers, and of councils to establish an opinion that must be founded in reason, and be agreeable to the common sense of mankind, or be founded in nothing, is not unlike the child who chooses a crown in several pieces of brass, rather than a guinea in one piece of gold. Thus, again, we must not imagine that we behold an example of modesty and moderation, when we see a whole sect of philosophers submit to the authority of one, as pagans, Christians; and Mahometans did in their turns, and for many ages, to that of Aristotle; whilst they dared to reason in no other form, nor on any other principles than those which he had prescribed. It is in truth an example of rank ambition. Such men, like the slaves who domineer in absolute monarchies, intend by their submission to a supreme tyrant to acquire the means of exercising tyranny in their turns.

There are innumerable cases in common life, and many in arts and sciences, wherein we must content ourselves, according to the condition of nature, with probability, and rely on authority for want of the means, or opportunities, of knowledge. I rely on the authority of my cook, when I eat my soup; on the authority of my apothecary, when I take a dose of rhubarb; on that of Graham, when I buy my watch, and that of Sir Isaac Newton, when I believe in the doctrine of gravitation; because I am neither

cook, apothecary, watchmaker, nor mathematician. But I am a rational creature, and am therefore obliged to judge for myself in all those cases where reason alone is the judge; the judge of the thing itself; for even in the others, reason is the judge of the authority. My parson might reproach me very justly with the folly of going through the journey of life without opening the eyes of my mind, and employing my intellectual sight. But my parson grows impertinent when he would persuade me, like those of your church, to remain in voluntary blindness; or like those of ours, to let him see for me, though my eyes are open, though my faculties of vision are at least as good as his, and though I have all the objects of sight before my eyes that he has before his.

Resignation to authority will appear the more absurd, if we consider, that by it we run two risks instead of one. We may deceive ourselves no doubt. But is the divine, is the philosopher, infallible? We shall not mean to deceive ourselves most certainly. But the divine, or the philsopher may intend to deceive us. He may find his account in it, and deceit may be his trade. Had these men that superiority over others, which some of them have assumed; did the sublime objects of divine philosophy appear to them, though they do not appear so to us, in the effulgence of an immediate and direct light, there would be some better reason than there is for a dependence on their authority, at least in one respect. We might own their knowledge sufficient to establish this authority, whatever we thought of their candor and sincerity. But God has dealt more equally with his human creatures. There is no such superiority of some over others. They who exercise their reason, and improve their knowledge the most, are dazzled and blinded whenever they attemp to look beyond the reflected light wherein it is given us to contemplate the existence, the nature, the attributes, and the will of God relatively to man. They who pretend to face, like so many intellectual eagles, the sun of eternal wisdom, and to see in that abyss of splendor, are so truly metaphysical madmen, that he who attends to them, and relies on them, must be mad likewise.

The more important any subject is, the more reason we have to be on our guard against the impositions and seductions of authority, and to judge in the manner we can for ourselves. The all-wise God has disposed the universal order so, that every man is, by his nature, capable of acquiring certain and sufficient knowledge of those things which are the most important to him, whilst he is left to probability and belief about others: and yet such are the contradictions which reconcile themselves to one another in the heads and hearts of men, that even they who

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