If we have for more than fifteen centuries, yielded ourselves to doctrines, conveyed to us through all the highways of life, so assiduously, that neither infancy, youth, manhood or old age, have escaped their tireless importunities for acceptance; doctrines, which consign seven-eighths of humanity to eternal torture for no faults to most of them but a lack of opportunity, which under Providence has been denied, it is not unreasonable to conclude, with this experience of the mutability of humanunderstanding, that there are other beliefs fastened on our minds by ages of custom and mistaken thought, equally untenable, which may be as justly placed in our catalogue of errors. Where then shall we look for truth? Authority, as we have seen, is not an infallible guide. We shall never know how much the industrious promulgation of error is due to the selfish love of corporate power, how much to a pure benevolence. Neither are the brightest minds safe monitors in all things of thought. Aristotle defended slavery, Hobbes persecution, Johnson witchcraft, and Gladstone religious superstition; but, for all that, we shall never arrive at the extremity of despair; for a cultivation of the mind, the deductive use of positive knowledge, and the untrammeled exercise of reason, lead to truth, as directly, as the line of gravity points to the center of the earth, and only by these will its reign be established in the world.
W. S.