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LETTER persons have at all times been hasty to form and eager to publish. But this is an evil and an abuse to which every thing human is liable. All the arts and sciences have suffered from rash pretenders and injudicious students. Natural philosophy, until lately, has been peculiarly deformed by the dreams and presumption of its professors. The opinions of the antient philosophers were more often chimeras, that would now disgrace any that were still in their nurseries, than the probable conjecture of reasoning men. But their errors and follies have not deterred

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later ages from studying the same subjects. On the contrary, they have but stimulated the mind to form wiser conjectures, and to obtain more certain knowlege. Still many in every generation stumbled on the threshold; but their blunders were both guideposts and incentives to happier efforts; and the reward of the persevering industry of human ability has been, that the general world has become possessed of a rich treasure of certain truth in every science, ennobling our common nature, and daily spreading happiness and benefit among us all.

The same consequences will attend the cultivation of divine philosophy. There have been plenty of

Thus Heraclitus thought the Sun was only the breadth of a man's foot, and Epicurus deemed it to be no larger than it appeared to be, or but a little more or less; while Xenophanes taught, that every day's Sun is extinguished when it sets, and that a new Sun comes up in the morning from the East. Plut. Plac. Phil. 1. ii. c. 21. c. 20.

So the Earth was by one philosopher deemed a flat table; by another, like a pillar; by a third, like a drum or tabor; and by a fourth, a dish, hollow in the middle. Plut. Plac. 1. iii. c. 10.

Even the worthy and fair-minded Herodotus, whose work gives us our first solid ground in ancient history and geography, declares, that it was quite laughable, and against common sense, to say that the ocean flows round the Earth, or that the Earth was globular, or that Asia was as large as Europe. Melp. 1. iv. c. 36.

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mistakes expressed and penned concerning it, and LETTER many wrong opinions may yet be uttered: but all such will be soon discarded. Whatever is erroneous, has no substantive vitality: it is perishable by its own nature, and will always be but the ephemeron of its day. It is born but to die: the more speedily, as it is more unfounded. While what is true and good, will soon be discovered to be so, and will always survive. We can judge much easier than we can discover; and no one can now start an absurdity but it is seen to be so, as soon as it is seen at all. The public mind has attained this improvement, that no defect can escape its criticism, no delusion can long deceive, no vice or folly elude either detection or condemnation. We need not therefore dread any thing on this ground from the study of our diviner science.

Increase of knowlege always puts our minds into a different state to that which they were in before it accrued. New thoughts and views occur to us as it comes, and change many of our ideas, and influence our future reasoning. It causes us to feel more strongly an ignorance in other matters, and to desire further information. What satisfied us on the points on which it bears, before we received the addition, no longer has that effect. We feel defects and errors in our opinions which we had not been conscious of, and we break up our attachment to many notions of which we once had no doubt. Hence more knowlege in any one branch of knowable subjects, leads us to seek, and seeking, to acquire an augmentation on others. It makes this plurality of information necessary to us; for our minds, if we think at all, will be felt to be full of incongruities and inequalities without it. The parts of our know

LETTER lege will be inconsistent with each other. We shall I. be walking about the world half child and half

man, unless we enlarge our information, and rectify our mistaken conceptions. All the divisions of our intellectual treasures must be improved, for us to have a right mind in any, that have reference to each other. And what is there in a world so finely and artificially complicated as both our material and living portions of it are, which has not reciprocal relations? We cannot avoid silently criticising ourselves full as much as others act the censors to us; and therefore we shall not feel that we are in the right intellectual state and position, unless we advance our attainments on all the subjects which occupy and actuate our own thoughts, and the minds of our contemporaries, whenever we have the opportunity, as well as on any single one that we may have selected or prefer.

To no topics of human meditation do these remarks apply more, than to those which we would class among the Divine ones; to all that is connected with the Deity and His revelations; and to the interest which we may have in them; the present as well as the eventual one.9

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Many of the ancients, notwithstanding their paganism, took a pleasure in thinking of Divine subjects. Diogenes is an instance of this; of whom Plutarch remarks:—

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'I approve of the saying of Diogenes, who, seeing in Lacedemon a stranger adorned for a feast, very solicitously said to him, Does not a good man think every day a feast, and will it not be altogether a splendid one to us if we are wise?' His additional meaning Plutarch thus illustrates or expresses: For this world indeed is a most holy temple, and highly worthy of God. Into this a man enters at his birth, not to gaze at motionless statues, or things made with hands, but to contemplate those objects which the Divine mind itself has made sensible to our understanding.' Plut. de Tranq. v. ii. p. 848.

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It is singular, but it is true, that increased science LETTER has almost always at first assumed an attitude of hostility towards these. This effect is not explainable on any principle of common sense or sound judgment. But however adverse to these, still it has repeatedly appeared, and is very operative in many individual cases at this moment. We

may, without

without any abusive meaning, attach the epithet of irrational to it; because as the adorable Deity is the fountain of all good and happiness, the maker, provider and giver of all our comforts, and whose omnipotence invests Him with an unbounded power of perpetually and indefinitely increasing His general bounty, and of enlarging our personal participation of it; it is extraordinary, it is unaccountable, that the mind should feel, under any circumstances, an indisposition towards Him, or any unwillingness to appreciate and contemplate His revelations to us, or any thing that has the smallest probable pretension to be so. In this respect our feelings seem far less judicious than those of the less enlightened antients; they, the greatest and the wisest of the Grecian world, flew with eagerness to their oracles, as the only chance of hearing the Divine will and ordainments; as those of the Roman state made auguries from the flights of birds, their most venerated science, because they were taught that by these their Deity indicated His wishes and intentions." Any avenue to know the will of God

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10 Cicero asks, What colony has Greece sent into Etolia, or Ionia, Asia, Sicily or Italy, without a reference to the Pythian, the Dodonean, or the Ammon oracle? What war did she ever undertake without first consulting her Gods?' Cic. Div. 1. i. c. 1.

"Romulus, the parent of our city, founded it by auspices, and was himself an optimus augur. All the after kings used augury, and when

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was precious above all things to them, however absurd were the means by which they supposed it was communicated. 12 This was the impulse of nature, not opposed by their reason. They were right, and wise in their principle of seeking to make their actions conformable to the will of Heaven, and of not going contrary to it; but, from ignorance and perverting superstitions, they took the wrong paths, selected wrong objects, and made what was nonsense and accident their channels and instructors. That we should recoil from their silly means, and seek more certain sources of the Divine knowlege which the human heart so pants for, and apply it more judiciously, would be quite natural now, indeed is inevitable, under our soul-expanding sciences. But that we should let our improvements set our minds in battle array against what is superior to them all, and throw away from us all the sacred materials for knowing what is so invaluable to every one, is a fractious mystery of the human spirit, which it is difficult to understand.

when they were expelled, nothing in public affairs, or in private households, or in war, was done without it.' Cic. Div. 1. i. c. 1. Plutarch makes his advocates for the superiority of land animals say, "A great and very antient part of divination is by augury from birds; for they are so swift, and so intelligent, and so pliable in their moveability to every imagination or thought, that they seem like instruments fit to be used by God, and to be turned as He pleases. Therefore now by their motions, and at other times by their voices and warblings and other gestures, He actuates them as He thinks proper, and uses them to promote some purposes of mankind, and to repress others.' Plut. Uter. Anim. v. iii. p. 1794.

12 Hence Cicero calls Divination 'a magnificent and salutary science, if any thing be such. It is that by which mortal nature may come nearest to the Divine power. I know of no nation, however civilized and learned, or fierce and barbarous, which does not think that future things may be signified and predicted to us.' Cic. Divin. 1. i. c. 1.